13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation.
13 CCR §228.20 (b) (3) – The manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles.
13 CCR §227.42 (b) (5) – Any act or omission of the manufacturer or one of its agents, employees, contractors, or designees which the department finds makes the conduct of autonomous vehicle testing on public roads by the manufacturer an unreasonable risk to the public.
13 CCR §227.42 (c) – The department shall immediately suspend or revoke the Manufacturer’s Testing Permit or a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit – Driverless Vehicles if a manufacturer is engaging in a practice in such a manner that immediate suspension is required for the safety of persons on a public road.
Edit: This Vice article [2] says Cruise tried to withhold pedestrian injury footage from the DMV.
> In the Order of Suspension, the California DMV said that the Cruise vehicle initially came to a hard stop and ran over the pedestrian. After coming to a complete stop, it then attempted to do a “pullover maneuver while the pedestrian was underneath the vehicle.” The car crawled along at 7 mph for about 20 feet, then came to a final stop. The pedestrian remained under the car the whole time.
> The day after the incident, DMV representatives met with Cruise to “discuss the incident.” During that meeting, Cruise only showed footage up to the first complete stop, according to the Order of Suspension. No one at Cruise told the officers or showed any footage of the subsequent pullover maneuver and dragging. The DMV only learned of that from “another government agency.” When DMV asked for footage of that part of the incident, Cruise provided it.
From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably.
They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far below the level of most Human drives.
They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways.
Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down.
From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all.
* Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic. There was zero chance a human would pull that off. Not enough time for a head check or mirror check. There wouldn't have been an accident but the Waymo clearly has insane reaction time and vision advantages - and uses them.
I saw a Waymo come to a screeching halt in a split second as a... less than intelligent individual... skateboarded in front of a bus, into the extremely busy road.
If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question.
Sometimes I'm riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I'm like "dang, why did I doubt you, robotic overload?"
The best part is that it works the same way in the day time vs the night time.
Waymo is amazing, knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety - I would feel safer riding in a Waymo than driving myself.
My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.
In the case of that particular incident, it seems that the pedestrian was “thrown” into the lane with Cruise when it was hit by another (human) driver.
Can any engineers in the field comment on whether the [very cool!] Waymo vs Cruise performance anecdotes being discussed here would have been the result of Google's millimeter-level scanning of SF? Or is it just better algos only? Or both?
I’d think better algorithms. A detailed scan of a city’s streets and layout is obsolete before it’s completed.
A driver (bot or not) needs very good reactions to bad situations observed in the field. And ideally a good sense for when a situation is one step from trouble. As a driver, if I can’t see through a bus then I’m going to assume a crazy pedestrian is waiting to jump in front of me.
(A lot of drivers are quite bad frankly and don’t do most of the stuff you’d want someone to do if they’re directing a one-ton blunt weapon around town at 35mph.)
"A lot of drivers are quite bad frankly and don’t do most of the stuff you’d want"
I'd say 90% of driving is good/safe driving is mental, with at least half of that bening based on the decision making capability. Yet our tests are mostly focused on physical ability with a small amount of memorizing a subset of the rules.
Pilots (at least to get the PPL) train at least around 40-60 hours on a live aircraft before flying solo. That's more rigorous, yet very close in principle to what we have in place to obtain a driver's permit, I'd argue.
I think it only took me a half dozen hours or so to get my license? But also that only tested me in best case scenarios with good visibility, other good drivers, etc. A better sim should test and train my response to unexpected events in less than ideal conditions.
Mine was 30 hours of lessons, 7 of behind the wheel practice. Most of that practice was very plain and simple. Parking lots, side streets, etc.
Being completely honest, I did not feel totally comfortable behind the wheel until maybe a week or of actually driving myself, post-license. (Not that I didn't have a lot more to learn, obviously)
During that week, I could have easily gotten into an accident and did have one or two closer calls.
I would not all be opposed to maybe an additional ~10 hours of more rigorous behind-the-wheel driving, or a very good-quality sim for that same amount of time.
But realistically, I'd imagine making this a hard requirement would hit some massive walls. Good simulators are expensive, everyone wants to drive, and states have very limited budgets for this sort of thing.
In Germany it’s 28 theory lessons, at least 12 practical lessons (including night driving and Autobahn), 1 multiple choice exam, 1 practical exam to get your driver’s license. Additionally, you need to successfully attend a full-day first aid course.
The multiple choice and practical exams are not done by the school, but by an accredited / governmental institution. Each have a ~30% failure rate.
Counting 1 lesson unit as 45 minutes it’s definitely not quite as rigorous as a PPL, but certainly in the same spirit, I’d argue.
Cruise vehicles have sufficient sensor payloads to produce a 'milimeter-level scanning of SF' with many fewer hours than they've been on the road there. I doubt that provides the biggest difference. It's all down the software at this point. Especially because they're not trying to do anything crazy like vision only.
We keep hearing this is crazy, but is there evidence to back that up? At this point with hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles logging millions of miles a month, I feel like we’d be hearing non-stop reports of destruction on the highways if it really is as crazy as the average HN reader has been led to believe.
the only reason we don't hear non-stop about destruction is that you're required to keep both hands on the wheel/yolk at ALL times while FSD is activated. comparing the current cameras on a Tesla to the human eye is just silly really, sure they cover 360 which is superior, but in almost any other way, the human eye is superior having better dynamic range, better contrast, better resolution and best of all, we have eye lids. if you would just sit down and think about it for 10 mins you'll realize that gimping your self driving car by using cameras only is just a very very silly proposition when we have all this cool tech like lidar essentially giving the car super powers.
If FSD drivers were having to constantly intervene because the car couldn’t accurately map obstacles, we’d be hearing a lot more about it. I drive with FSD all the time - I could give you a list of things it needs to improve on, but not a single one has anything to do with its accuracy of understanding its surroundings.
>not a single one has anything to do with its accuracy of understanding its surroundings.
This has been my gripe for a long time. I feel like many in tech have conflated two problems. With current software the problem of perception (ie "understanding its surroundings") is largely solved*, but this shouldn't be conflated with the much more difficult problem of self-driving.
*for sure, there have been issues with perception. A glaring example is the Uber fatality in AZ.
This exactly. Reading the comments and understanding the huge gap between perception and reality of FSD is eye opening. There are a lot of armchair experts here who wouldn’t be caught dead driving a Tesla but are so confident in their understanding of its strengths, weaknesses, and the underlying reasons.
I do see stories about FSD seemingly trying to drive into obstacles fairly often. It’s true that it does see most obstacles, but most is not good enough for this.
Accuracy of surroundings is absolutely something it could improve on. Adding a different modality (like lidar) would be like adding another sense. Seeing an 18 wheeler without under guards would be easier with an additional sense. It makes the intelligence part easier because the algorithm can be more sure about it's interpretation of the environment.
And no, a neural net and two cameras are not "just fine". The day cameras will be as good as your eyes and your neural net will be on the level of human intelligence (AGI) then maybe it would be possible. But until then you will need to rely on extra hardware to get there.
Go check on youtube how FSD behaves in city with 1/10th the complexity of SF/Waymo. And remember the difficulty is with the long tail of unexpected events.
We don't drive just fine, we routinely kill each other, often because of poor visibility or not noticing motion. Backing into a busy street? Bam. Open your door without checking? Biker down. Passing a bus at a crosswalk? Pedestrian dead. Driving at night with heavy fog? Off the cliff.
Even your basic non-fancy non-AI car these days have a variety of sonar/radar assists to help out their cameras. Tesla is just being cheap (and getting people killed because of it).
>with hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles logging millions of miles a month, I feel like we’d be hearing non-stop reports of destruction
Why do you believe that Tesla vehicles are driving millions of miles a month on autopilot?
I suspect that autopilot accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of Tesla miles-driven. Mostly because it sucks, but also because of how hard it is to not miss a nag on a long road trip, with the result that you are locked out of autopilot until your next stop.
(Yes, even when paying attention to the road, with your hands on the wheel. Hell, autopilot locks you out if you exceed 85 mph for more than a few seconds by pressing the accelerator, such as when passing. This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph.)
I love the performance of my Model S Plaid. Autopilot, however, is a joke.
Wow, I've had much more positive experiences with Autopilot on multi-hour highway trips. No shutoffs, no phantom braking in the last year or two. Autopilot on the highway is so much better than any other car I've driven with adaptive cruise. Anyway, the parent is comparing city and highway self-driving and they are completely different.
Tesla reported that there were 400,000 cars in the US and Canada who had access to FSD Beta in January 2023, so I don’t think that’s at all hard to believe.
I probably use AP >80% of the time on the highway. From observing comments in the local Tesla groups, I'm sure there are plenty of people who behave similarly.
Millions of miles per month doesn't surprise me at all.
Poland? 140km/h is the motorway speed limit. Admittedly there aren't that many Teslas here. But they are extremely popular in Germany and you see people drive them at silly speeds.
"Extremely popular in Germany" is a bit of a stretch, from googling around, there are only around 40k Teslas out of 48 million cars overall in Germany (which is about 0.08%).
Well, yes - I think what I really meant was that they are extremely popular[among electric cars]. Whenever I drive through Germany and stop at an autohof all tesla chargers are always occupied, and you see quite a lot of them on the roads just driving around. But you're right, 40k is nothing in such a big country.
Some German cars are driven at sillier speeds. I've been on the autobahn driving my Model S at well over 200 kph and been passed quite quickly by big German cars.
> This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph.
Once traffic rules are enforced by autonomous cars that don't let you go over the speed limit, we can start raising the limit to more realistic levels. I guess currently it is priced in that everyone goes over by x km/h.
>Once traffic rules are enforced by autonomous cars that don't let you go over the speed limit, we can start raising the limit to more realistic levels. I guess currently it is priced in that everyone goes over by x km/h.
Bloody noghtmare fuel that, but it's been the inexhorable direction manufacturers and Governments have been pushing for for a while.
Stop making things that enable people more than it constrains them. The act of velvet glove societal manipulation is pretty damn obnoxious once you realize it's a thing.
https://waymo.com/safety/ is probably your best resource. You can follow the links from there to learn about all the things they're doing with simulation, etc.
I know most of it was PR but the stuff Waymo did about showing a test course they built and actually having "unit tests" related to driving showed me they're not dumping these things on the road to make money, they're trying to get it right.
The competition:
Uber kills someone and turns out they disabled "breaking due to objects in the way" because it makes it jerkier.
Tesla is often killing the drivers because they marketed it as "auto-pilot"
Cruise rolled over someone for 20 seconds.
I would have to agree. I honestly hate regulatory capture in most industries, but perhaps Waymo's "unit tests" should be turned over to the DMV and made as the gold standard driving test for AI drivers.
> My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them
Exactly this. When I saw Tesla releasing their half-backed crap I feared they will damage the public perception so badly that we wouldn't have self-driving cars for years.
Ah yeah, when something doesn’t conform to your narrative, it surely is an astroturf. All coming from accounts that are many years old and have thousands of karma points that leave meaningful posts on all types of topics. But the second they post about Waymo in a positive light, that instantly means astroturfing and not their true opinion based on their lived experiences.
Realistically, there are a lot of Googlers and Xooglers on Hacker News.
One of the messages in this thread is literally stating they have special knowledge of the behinds the scene workings of Waymo.
I work in the AV space and I honestly don't think there's much of a competitive mentality between the companies in the space, but at the same time there is a tendency of people to psudeo-astroturf these brands: where they know someone working at the company and take great personal pride because "I know so and so who works on self-driving cars!"
Astroturfing isn't "I have worked here and am therefore biased when expressing support for the product", it's (to quote Wikipedia) "the practice of hiding the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, grassroots participants."
If they explicitly disclose their internal knowledge or affiliation, it's not astroturfing. If they used to work for the company but are now unaffiliated, it's not astroturfing. If the company isn't knowledgeable or supporting of the effort, it's not astroturfing. etc.
> They have partial relationships that they don't feel the need to disclose.
Well, that's your assumption. I would preface that with "probably", since we don't know this for a fact.
> Most of them did not mention any relationship: hence the "psuedo-astroturfing"
Side note: I think you mean "quasi-", not "pseudo-". [1]
But, more to your intended point: the point I'm getting at is that that you're really stretching the definition of astroturfing here, even with the weasel wording added on it.
Astroturfing is a central campaign coordinated by a vendor in a manner as to appear decentralized. It's really an accusation against the central entity rather than as the pawns they're using in the process. So quasi-astroturfing might be a situation where (say) the vendor doesn't actually organize the campaign, but pays an advertiser who internally organizes the campaign without the knowledge of the vendor. The vendor might overlook signs that this is happening, without directly supporting it. Or they might not realize it at all. That's something that would be close to astroturfing, but not exactly it.
However, people advocating for a product due to their genuine personal opinions in a way that's clearly uncoordinated and unsupported by the vendor is not remotely "astroturfing" in any sense. It's a biased expression of opinions, with a potential conflict of interest (if they're still affiliated with that vendor).
All of which I think matters not only because words matter, but also particularly because this site's rules treat astroturfing differently from "someone is biased on the internet", and the admins very much don't want accusations of astroturfing without evidence.
[1] Pseudo- means fake, like how pseudoscience is fake science. Pseudo-astroturfing would be fake astroturfing, or the faking of fake grassroots support. Meaning you'd be accusing people of being real grassroots supporters who are pretending to be fake ones, which would make for a funny accusation.
When you're indirectly related to the brand and that's affecting your eagerness, it's something akin to astroturfing in why astroturfing is looked down on: ie. you're biased
But it doesn't have the malice/intent of astroturfing.
> One of the messages in this thread is literally stating they have special knowledge of the behinds the scene workings of Waymo.
I may have hinted as such (being an ex-Googler), and I know this thread has gotten kinda buried but I wanted to address the implication anyway.
When I left Google I sold all of my stock. My investment portfolio is independently managed and I do not advise any specific positions except for the exclusion of my current and former employers. I do not stand to gain financially from any company in the AV space.
Thank you. Contrary to other replies, you do not have to be employed directly by [Institution] expressly for the purposes of covertly pushing an agenda to be guilty of astroturfing.
What's important is the existence or appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly if you're not disclosing your connection. Having a friend who works for Google who might be upset at criticism counts. Being a former employee with stock counts. Having any kind of monetary or professional interest in FSD companies succeeding counts.
If someone is presenting their statements as that of a person who is not involved, and they actually are, their behavior is duplicitous, and justifiably characterized as astroturfing.
It's justifiably characterized as biased. We lose a useful term for distinguishing normal bias from marketing or PR instigated efforts. That's the point of the term astroturfing. It's useful in that regard. Or I suppose, if it's definition has truly shifted, was useful.
Can a stand-alone complex be an astroturf? I think so, if the social conditions that create the behavior stem from a single entity that stands to benefit.
The point of astroturfing (in comparison to the term it derives from, grassroots) is that it's not people coming together to support a policy, it's people with a vested interest in an entity taking cues from that entity to act in their interests in such a way that it appears as the former. The definition never shifted, the tactics just became less obvious. I would be less suspicious if more comments were complaining or giving measured thoughts, but they weren't.
If I may really stretch the metaphor, I'd say individuals with vested interests are more like sod. They really hold those opinions, and are motivated to express them, but do so "unnaturally". Vs commercial efforts that are entirely fake and are therefore astroturf :D
Bias exists. But by removing the financial incentive from the definition of astroturfing, you make it useless when it comes to distinguishing from bias. Otherwise you turn it into "how many degrees of separation can I find to Waymos" and it gets infinitely tenuous.
I would agree that Waymo employees or shareholders shouldn't be commenting here without disclosing their affiliation. But that's a relatively small class: Googlers (and, increasingly tenuous, Xooglers) don't get paid by Waymo and don't get exposure to it through their GSUs. You can make the claim that Waymo's success adds to Google's brand prestige and has knock-on effects, and maybe that's true to some limited extent. But comparing that to being directly paid by the company to spread propaganda is quite the reach.
>What's important is the existence or appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly if you're not disclosing your connection. Having a friend who works for Google who might be upset at criticism counts. Being a former employee with stock counts. Having any kind of monetary or professional interest in FSD companies succeeding counts.
I feel kinda the same way about Waymo like I did about Apple as a relatively early adopter. The experience is genuinely magical, and there’s a massive gulf between Cruise and Waymo’s capabilities.
A sufficiently good product may produce customer reviews that are indistinguishable from astroturfing.
"unable to move and blocking traffic" is not a new failure mode for cars. I get that it's particularly infuriating to be blocked by a car that is, mechanically, in good shape, but I don't find the story particularly damning. I've blocked traffic that long waiting for a tow truck.
The case he described is different in that, apparently, the vehicles in question lock all of their wheels and can't be accessed, even by law enforcement. A special tow has to be called in. It's a design decision made to protect the company at the expense of the public.
I can't wait till those are generally available. I'd go out more if i could have a nice night and not have to deal with coming home later. Hell i live about 1.5h from Seattle and i never go because it's just awful (to me) dealing with cars there. If i could get a cab all the way there and back? Oh man, amazing. Or even park and ride would be nice. Cities seem so much more approachable to me if i don't need to drive them. It's a me-issue, for sure, but still.
If feel like Seattle needs an all day and weekend Sounder service, more than it needs self driving robo-taxis. 1.5 hours away you might be at the edge or beyond Sounder reach so this may not help you much unless you get a local bus to your closest station, but you can probably still just drive to your closest station and not having to have to deal with driving in the city.
If the Sounder would run like the ferries do (say every hour until like 8PM and then a couple more trips before midnight) it would really take the hassle of going to the city for much more people than robo-taxis ever could.
I am staring aghast with European eyes at a city of 4 million people where the commuter rail doesn't run outside peak hours. How do you get home if you go out for a couple of drinks with colleagues, or stay late for a call?
You shouldn't be asking for a couple of trains between 8pm and midnight. They should be every half hour, or more! Midnight until 6am on Saturday and Sunday could be every hour or two.
(I live in Copenhagen, half the population of Seattle. Commuter trains run every 20 minutes from 5-24h, every 10 6-18, all night on Friday and Saturday nights. Other trains also run, and the metro is 24/7.)
We taxpayers already spend >$30 per person-trip for the Sounder. It currently doesn't connect well to transit on either end (most users drive to it), and half the city is fighting to make sure it doesn't connect directly with the new "light rail" station. Also our light rail is longer end-to-end than the Paris metro and half the stations are on the freeway with massive parking garage and no pedestrian amenities. Riding transit in the Seattle area is insulting and demeaning.
I've ridden the train in Copenhagen. The stops are near things! Stores and parks! Apartments and hotels! Shopping malls! Like, actually right there! There's a few stops like that in Seattle, but they're also the ones with junkies nodding off, con men "looking for some gas money", and other anti-social behavior.
We sabotage our transit. The Rail Runner doesn't go all the way to terminals at ABQ. That's insane! Were the Santa Fe airport people against it? What gives?
In the wee hours catching a train and bus to get home is kind of annoying in Malmö. Mainly the buses basically stop running more than once an hour between 1-5am.
Most US towns are basically uber/taxis only at that time. I live in Austin where you could theoretically be one of the lucky 1% of the population that both lives near a train station and wants to go somewhere near where that train station is. Even then you can’t use the train past something like 11pm on weekends. Capmetro’s hours are a pretty decent source of consternation for us here
Malmö is a fifth of the size of Copenhagen, or a tenth of Seattle. Once an hour at night isn't so bad for a city that size, isn't it? The trains to Copenhagen run all night, so I can get home...
Even before talking about traina, you'd need to get rids of the suburbs and the clear separation of housing and commercial stuff.
There is so much thing to undo and people are so overly sensitive of the value of their property it is nearly impossible or would take centuries to fix.
Trains are very expensive to build and maintain, so they only work if your city has enough density to support them with sufficient ridership. America really screwed itself by building cities for cars instead of people, and it's hard to change this at this point, especially when every effort at making cities there more walkable and dense is met with fierce opposition.
America has loads of cities and metro areas with way more density than European cities with effective rail systems. You’re right that it’s hard to change due to historical choices, but it may still be worthwhile to transition as soon as possible rather than continue down the wrong path.
Do we actually? European cities that I have been to all have zones with nothing but apartment buildings in dense urban configuration that go on for miles. I've never seen something like that in the states outside of NYC.
There's a select few. Boston. Washington DC. Chicago. The only city in which not owning a car does not involve sacrifice in your lifestyle is New York City.
I think the main problem with the Sounder is not a lack of density (Seattle and Tacoma are both plenty dense; also both the rail corridor and the rolling stock already exist; only missing expensive part is the crew) but rather it is on a very congested freight corridor (particularly the north part to Everett) owned partly by the freight company. So it is hard for Sound Transit to negotiate more usage of the corridor for increased frequency.
Dunno where you are, but trains suck arse here in the UK. Its half the price to fly to Edinburgh than to take a train and my wife recently took a stressful (delays and cancellations and missed connections) two and a half hour train ride that would have taken an hour.
Honestly I think busses are far superior due to not having so many dependencies.
I would have thought this was hyperbole had I not experienced this living in Kent years ago. It's in fact worse. It was twice as expensive to take a train from Canterbury to Stansted than it was to fly from Stansted to Glasgow. Still, having experienced public transport in the UK (the Underground is everything) and everywhere else, the US car culture is the worst. It keeps poor people poor. Your car breaks down, your license gets suspended you cannot go to work. And the acres of parking tarmac filled with cars that are stationary 95% of the time. It's so ugly and such a waste of resources. I happened to live and work along one of the few routes in my city where I could get the bus to work when I first moved to the US. People at work thought I was too poor to afford a car, it was always funny to explain that public transport is the norm in most of the rest of the world.
Ya, nothing in the states is set up for that outside of maybe NYC. We just grew our urban planning post war based on cars. It is absolute insanity. Seattle is even considered one of the better cities for public transit.
The Sounder is a heavy rail train on rails that are shared with other trains (e.g. freight). It runs about 7 times per day in one direction and about 10 times per day in the other. There's no reason to run additional trains on that line, because taking it depends almost entirely on finding an empty space in parking garages that are full by about 6AM.
The Seattle area has a newer, dedicated light rail system (Link) that runs every 5-10 minutes from about 5AM to about 1:00AM. The stations are located much more conveniently and frequently, because they were placed based on where a commuter train should stop, not trying to piggyback on existing freight lines. There still isn't as much parking as there should be, but at least the stations are placed so that more than a tiny handful of people can get there without driving and parking.
I’m not so sure about that. The North line connects to Edmonds which is a major ferry terminal used by a fairly large number of people on the Kitsap peninsula, Port Townsend etc. plus another ferry terminal on Mukilteo for Whitby island. These are major connections which are unusable in the 4 trains a day frequency (Sounder only runs 2 trips and Amtrak Cascade the other 2; latter does not stop at Mukilteo). The link is good and all that but it won’t reach Everett for another 20 years and it won’t connect with the ferries either.
The South direction is a little better (and is improving even further with more Cascade runs on the horizon) but it is the same story. For example, Pyuallup and Sumner are both decent sized towns wit centrally located station, which won’t get light rail and the 1 line won’t reach Tacoma until 2035 at least. There is also a decent transit center at Lakewood, however I would argue it should probably be better to run the 620 all the way to Tacoma, from where Olympia people could jump onto a Sounder or light rail.
I agree. I actually live a bit closer to Seattle then OP, only 40 min on bus + boat (add 20 outside of commuter hour for a second bus). The Sounder doesn’t actually run anywhere near me, (well I could take the 118 south to the Tahlequah ferry terminal, 10 min boat to Point Defiance, a Pearce transit bus to Tacoma, and ride the Sounder from there; which urbanists call the “long way”). so this doesn’t affect me personally.
But you are absolutely right, Tacoma and Everett are 3rd and 4th largest cities in the state and are in the same metro area as Seattle. The north line is actually worse, only 2 trains a day (plus 2 Amtrak Cascade trains) even though there is major Ferry terminal connection at Edmonds (and a smaller but significant at Mukilteo). The Sounder service is dismal and needs to be improved (thankfully we are getting more service on the Amtrak Cascades which runs the same corridor but goes all the way to Portland and Vancouver BC. but not nearly enough)
That said, the bulk of the population in the Seattle metro area is serviced with the Link light rail. They are almost done with an extension east to Bellevue (turns out building rail on a floating bridge is hard) and eventually it will reach both Tacoma and Everett. Then they will get the frequency they deserve.
As for me, how do I get home. My ferries actually run all night (although with up to 3 hour gaps in the middle of the night) and frequently enough. If there isn’t a bus on the island, I usually just call my partner and she picks me up at the terminal, sometimes I also meet someone I know in the ferry.
The funny bit is that I actually immigrated here from Europe, and my tiny European island in the North Atlantic actually has way worse public transit system as Seattle. So for me this is a huge improvement. I’m actually going home to visit and am planning to see a friend of my play at a concert it a town 40 min from the capital, but there are no buses, so I actually have to call my mom to pick me up when the concerts are done.
I live in Ballard, so the sounder goes right by me. We (my kid and I) even watch it go by sometime. Nowhere near to get on, though, so I’ve actually never been on one before. It would be a cool way to link Ballard to downtown Seattle by rail before 2040.
Faroes? I visited during Covid, so there was no need to try staying out late.
But the population of the whole country is 1/100 of Seattle. Buses in some place during the day, and taxis at other times, is proportionate to what's available in Copenhagen.
I grew up in a small village in England. Choices for a night out were staying over at a friend's house (much preferable) or splitting the £15 taxi between several teenagers, which was a decent price as far as our parents were concerned. (Or walking for two hours and keeping the money, don't tell mum.)
Not quite that tiny. Iceland. The public transit system inside the capital area is decent (probably better then Spokane’s despite being similar of size) but after midnight it is really nothing, and on the weekends the frequency gets kind of bad (not North America level bad though). However ones you go outside of the capital area the system really sucks. Despite receiving over a million tourists which more then justifies an airport train, there is only a bus every couple of hours to the airport and adjacent towns (with a pathetic shelter).
While we’re at it, could we get at least one late night/overnight Amtrak Cascades train? I’d go to a lot more Mariners or Kraken games if it didn’t mean choosing between the hassle of driving and parking or needing a hotel room after the game. If sports aren’t your thing substitute any activity that goes beyond 6pm.
The current ride pricing feels about 10-20% less than an Uber in SF - but I haven't really checked properly. So don't expect the rideshare product (Waymo One) to be a super cheap option.
From my personal experience they are priced cheaper for all rides. But rarely that much cheaper - perhaps a surge time?
The variable that differs is time to pickup. I've found Waymo is generally pretty good for me in off-peak times - perhaps on average 2-3 minutes further away on average. But I have got the odd "20 minutes away" and I then just order an Uber.
But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are the same distance away. I love playing my own music and just being in my own world without another human to consider. It is truly a relaxing commute.
> But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are the same distance away. I love playing my own music and just being in my own world without another human to consider. It is truly a relaxing commute.
Not to ruin your commute, do you know if there are interior-facing cameras monitoring the passengers?
Are you able to play music on the car speakers from your phone? The process on iPhone seems very awkward (talking to google assistant instead of just selecting a song).
I do it the awkward way too. But I typical play an artist that I loved two decades ago and crank the volume. So "My music" wasn't the best way to describe it. More music that is just for me. I don't find their inbuilt music channels you can play from the center console to be that good. There is lots of UX things that could be done with music that wouldn't be hard.
isn't that just because the waymos are still funded by VCs? an uber might've been the same 10 years ago, but now they've achieved world domination it's time to make a profit
Waymo is fully owned by a public company. Economically they are indistinguishable from Uber (other than having a huge ad profit center to subsidize them). What VCs are you referring to?
Waymo is definitely in the phase where they want to form a positive impression on all fronts: safety, convenience, price. Once widespread, it's possible that they'll charge more than Uber because of the extra privacy and safety in a Waymo ride.
>Once widespread, it's possible that they'll charge more than Uber because of the extra privacy and safety in a Waymo ride.
It's possible, but I don't think it's something you can assume. Having to pay for a chauffeur isn't cheap, and that's what you're doing with Uber. A robotaxi avoids that cost since it drives itself.
Engineers are significantly more expensive than chauffeurs, especially since the chauffeurs get paid roughly minimum wage - or less. I too am very curious where pricing settles out.
Well no, it depends on the multiple. Minimum wage is $15000, and an engineer costs Google an average of at least 10X that in base salary, plus another 10X that in equity. I think the break-even is probably closer to 20 cars per engineer.
Currently they have ~250 cars in SF, and 2,500 employees of which about 600 are engineers.
To break even I'd say they probably need at least 12,000 cars, assuming they don't hire any more engineers and the other 1,900 employees are costless. This also assumes that the cost of the Waymo is exactly the same as a regular car, which at least today, isn't even close. And that the server infrastructure is free, and that insurance is comparable. It's probably also too early to know what the maintenance cost of these systems is compared to a vanilla vehicle.
Given how many taxis a typical city has, there's no way that the cost of engineers would come close to the cost of chauffeurs.
In fact, this is the way economics work for many forms of automation: you're replacing a large amount of labor time with a much smaller amount of engineering time. The engineering time is more expensive of course, but the much smaller amount more than makes up for the increased cost.
Litigating accidents will cost more because suddenly it's not "partner" at fault but your own people. Also, someone's gotta buy that new yacht somehow...
Uber was trying the "there can be only one" approach of operating at a loss to squeeze out competitors on both sides of their business model. The pandemic and other factors disrupted that plan. So now they are scrambling for profit while not having being configured for it.
No, it will be the United Way. Or to help give poor children blankets.
And it will be offered, when Waymo's onboard AI detects you're on a date, verbally, so the date can hear.
So even if you give to charites in a meaningful way, you'll end up doing it again or look crass and be embarrassed. And as with many of these "at the till" charity collections, there is a fee given to the collector.
Who will be Google! Plus, not only do they get to track your co-riders, eg who you associate with, and where you go, and even all conversation in the car (anonymized, of course), now they get to track your charitable predilections, by offering choice.
You own the phone. And they mostly get in trouble for lying about the things they record on phone, not for doing it.
But they own the car. And is it illegal for a cabbie to listen, and then tell their boss a stock tip, or that the Jones are buying a new house?
To add distance, they could real time listen in car, process locally, and only upload highlights as tags/text, so no recording. They could also process live, and then offer services in ride, eg "notice your hair is shaggy, Google Maps says this is a good barber!", and of course if you want that referral, as a barber, Google Maps you pay.
Google can't help itself. It is like a kleptomaniac, it knows it shouldn't, but for those voices in its head(managers), do it.. do it! You know you want to, you need to, you should!
Oh it's so shiny oh god...
And it relents, turning all pure dreams into ashes.
Waymo will be the ultimate platform to know even more about you, and to monetize it further.
In the long term, prices will be determined by what the market will bear. It will be irrelevant if Waymo is cheaper to operate because they don't have to pay a driver. And if Waymo is the only game in town, as it seems to be far ahead of everyone else, expect only a minor discount over the regular human driven cab.
I took an Uber to/from Seattle Airport, but that was like 7 years ago back when they were in undercutting price mode lol. Iirc it was in the $80 range (per trip).
Well worth it to me because i dislike traffic and parking that much. However i bet i could find a park and ride that's easy and save myself a decent chunk. .. not sure how to find a _safe_ park and ride, though.. heh.
Autonomous rides would be great for me though as they represent stability. Getting a driver was always a mixed bag. Would they be creepy? Talk a lot? Drive poorly? etcetc. Down in Florida i had one break the law several times and in general drive like a maniac. I don't take that many ubers/etc, but the ones i have have really felt like a mixed bag. A dice roll on all the variables, more bad than good.
No, at least not for me. As my other comment[1] mentions, there's enough friction with ubers that it's not an enjoyable experience. I'll use them in a pinch, but i avoid them if possible.
Good grief, two skateboarders lives saved by a Waymo in two consecutive comments.
A couple of weeks ago I came across a biker partially lying in the road, trapped by his bike. I parked my van at an angle, so if it was hit from behind it should roll past him. I jumped out and performed an assessment (I'm a qualified, OK: certificated first aider). I diagnosed "pissed" and ascertained he was unharmed. We got his bike in the back of the van with the help of some concerned pedestrians who initially thought I'd hit him. I drove him home.
I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain. What sort of sensors do these Waymo things have? They will have to be really, really clever and seriously expensive.
I don't deny that eventually a vehicle with enough decent sensors and some fancy processing will outperform me but I've managed 30+ years on the road with just a few scratches, a broken wing mirror and a rear ending from an articulated lorry.
I've managed to return a hire car around Napoli (Italy) after a couple of weeks without any issues! That may not sound too impressive but have a look at the state of vehicles around St Antonio Abate etc - it looks like the locals play bumper cars. May I also note that I'm a Brit and we drive on the left. Italians don't. So I can adapt to local conditions. I have also driven across large parts of the rest of Europe and the north Americas. I can adapt to local driving styles from the "use your entire car as the indicator" as seen in the Amalfi coastal area (int al) to "no after you" as you tend to see in large parts of the UK and Eire. I can deal with all the different regulations. A classic European one you don't see elsewhere is the white diamond sign with a yellow centre that indicates that you have right of way until it is cancelled with black stripes. Then there is the French "priority to the right" thing (which has also pervaded the UK somewhat wrt roundabouts).
Though Waymo et al aren't really competing with unusually good drivers, more with average drivers and they are probably safer there, on the roads they have been trained for.
The thing is most drivers should not be allowed to drive given their low training, driving standard, general lack of empathy and/or medications or substance abuse issues but society incorrectly assume driving is a right while it should be considered a privilege you earn and that can be revoked anytime based on regular tests + eventual tickets.
I estimate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allowed to drive given their current driving standards. Possibly more could be allowed after additionnal training and showing better driving standards knowing their license is at risk.
>
Ironically, it is very unempathetic to claim 80% of drivers lack empathy.
Well I may not have phrased it correctly but I am not claiming that. Lack of empathy is one of the various causes of a majority of drivers being unfit for driving.
Ahem... "lack of empathy", how do you plan to quantify/measure that.
Also, I was under the impression that in most countries on this planet, the priviledge of being allowed to drive a car is handed out with the drivers licence, which in most countries, you actually have to have training and a test for. I also thought it was normal practice that these licenses also get revoked, based on tickets...
The only gripe I have with the system is that elderly are not automatically subjected to a regular test of their mental faculties and remaining sight. I am getting sick of 90 year old grandmas killing 3 year olds "by accident".
> Ahem... "lack of empathy", how do you plan to quantify/measure that.
That is a tricky one.
> Also, I was under the impression that in most countries on this planet, the priviledge of being allowed to drive a car is handed out with the drivers licence, which in most countries, you actually have to have training and a test for.
Training which varies a lot depending on the country. I did a lot of hours + 3000kms under supervision of my father + dedicated classes with emergency from 90kph to 0 braking on varying surfaces, including having 2 wheels on gravel and 2 wheels on pavement to be able to handle situations where the car would naturally go sideways. My Mexican partner in comparison took a handful of classes using an automatic car and only passed the test using a simulator and there you go she had her license.
> I also thought it was normal practice that these licenses also get revoked, based on tickets...
It needs an absurd amount of them for it to happen and we should still require periodic tests and knowledge refresh of the rules of the road.
> I am getting sick of 90 year old grandmas killing 3 year olds "by accident".
I am pretty sure they represent a marginal fraction of the accidents/killing compared to distracted drivers.
> I am pretty sure they represent a marginal fraction of the accidents/killing compared to distracted drivers.
In Germany, if seniors end up in traffic incidents, they are in a vast majority of cases ruled responsible for causing them [1]. They may not be the group that causes the most accidents, partially because they drive less than someone in their 40s commuting for hours every day, but the difference of at-fault cases is nonetheless significant.
vThanks for postng this. It is a small step towards ensuring public safety, but it is a datapoint which might get older people to think, or more likely, revolt. Still, thanks for helping to fight the tyrany of the eldery.
Distracted or elderly, we seem to agree that regular re-evaluation of drivers would be necessary.
And yes, I know that the standards of different countries are vastly different when it comes to obtaining a drivers license. I could have bought a drivers license while in south america. I am writing this because I am blind. Entertained the thought just for fun and to be able to show how broken the system is.
Re old folk driving I think that may be a problem that could be solved by self driving tech. The trouble with just banning oldies when they are getting less good is that a lot of them rely on the car and cause less deaths than teens driving who are much less reliant on cars. I'm wondering if the tech will kick in in time for my mum who's 86. My other relatives have had to stop around 90 due to hitting stuff.
Frankly, I dont care if they rely on a car or not. All I care is how much they endanger other drivers and pedestrians. And I dont want to wait for self-driving tech for this problem to be solved either. I am a blind pedestrian. I cant jump aside if some old fart suddenly fails to react and is about to hit me. I am afraid of mentally and physically unstable drivers. AFRAID!
"I estimate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allowed to drive"
I don't know where you are but in the UK the driving test is pretty tricky. I failed it twice before passing and that was before it had the theory test added on. That was 30 years ago.
We all have our own perceptions of other drivers but you do need to try to think in their shoes. Today, whilst driving home I noticed a police car lights to the left and decided to indicate and move from lane one to two to give them room. The land rover behind me decided to undertake me and blunder through in lane one. Now the LR made a perfectly legitimate move - stay on track. They then undertook me (naughty). They did their thing and came across as wankers.
I think this ignores the way society is governed. It's easy for an engineer-mindset to think the bar to be cleared is "better than the average driver". But these systems must operate in a society that is often employing something other than an engineering mindset.
I doubt the public and their political representatives (absent regulatory capture) would turn over control to a mere average robot. Do you think, for example, most people would be okay in a drone airliner that is equivalent to the average pilot? I suspect most people would balk at the idea. A large part of the public policy piece is about trust; humans have evolved to understand and predict the behavior of other humans which leads to mental models about who can be trusted and who can't. We don't have those same evolved intuitions about robuts and, when combined, with our natural risk aversion biases, it's going to take a lot more than "average performance" to get society as a whole to fully trust robotic safety critical operations.
Yes trial attorneys will keep the bar very high for safety. As they should. But the bar in not infinitely high. Tech companies are salivating to disrupt the transportation market. They want a piece of your car payment, your insurance payment, your taxi spend. Insurance converts the minute risk of large accident costs into fixed premium payment. Lobbying helps convert financial capital into political capital and then into regulatory change. Our political process tends to follow the desires of the top 0.1% more than the bottom 40% combined.
Our current regime of car infrastructure was once unthinkable. Entire neighborhood were bulldozed to make way for highways. Yet today the government paying for highways, roads, and mandating each building be surrounded with amble parking is the status quo.
I’m not sure the original intent of the national highway system can be chalked up to the interests of the 0.1%. It’s generally attributed to national security, which is a very public interest.
While Eisenhower was inspired by the German autobahn, military use of roads was a sales talking point. The real reason for highways was to allow favored Americans to live in detached houses while still accessing city jobs. We could have it both ways!
Rail is a much more efficient way to move troops and equipment. Modern warfare requires lightning fast movement which means cargo planes. Eisenhower himself used a “New Look” policy of relying heavily on nuclear weapons so that the army could be scaled back.
After looking into a bit, I think you're right about the impetus of the national highway system. But, while rail is more efficient way to move materiel, it's also less flexible and more vulnerable. I think in that aspect, a highway system is probably preferable.
I probably should have said better than the average taxi driver as those generally don't include teenagers, 90 year olds and so on. Re the politics say human drivers in an area cause 10 deaths a year vs robot causing 6. Do you think voters are going to say we should have more deaths because humans doing it is better? That said I think people generally expect automated systems to be safe and probably self driving cars will be when they de glitch them. And then self driving cars will compete against other self driving cars more than against humans.
One under appreciated benefit they have is the "eyes" on a Waymo car are mounted at the corners and high above the roof, giving it a much better vantage point that just sitting in the driver seat.
This is an important point. Humans have evolved a way to intuit the thoughts and behaviors of other drivers. It’s why people who are mentally ill are unsettling; it’s very hard to pick up on their intentions and course of action. That’s why in think the hurdle isn’t “better than the average human driver.” Because humans won’t trust a machine in the same way as another human, the level of safety for AVs may have to be much, much greater before the public as a whole trusts them with safety critical decisions.
Yes they can. They are absolutely capable of looking at gestures. That matters a lot more when you're trying to determine the intent of a pedestrian than a driver. If it's another driver, the system can also do real time physics calculations to avoid a vehicle straying into the av's trajectory. And they might even do some kind of computer vision with other drivers to determine intent. Also if another driver just hits the car because they were distracted, why would the AV be at fault?
These are really sophisticated systems and they've really thought of a lot of issues. All of these companies have hundreds, if not thousands of engineers who have been working on this problem for over a decade, as well as an army of lawyers trying to get things into compliance. I don't think "well it can't do x as well as a human" is going to hold up in 10 or 20 years when these systems are clearly much safer. Human driven cars will eventually be uninsurable.
> All of these companies have hundreds, if not thousands of engineers who have been working on this problem for over a decade,
So do a lot of tech companies that make a lot of dangerous, fraudulant, or just bad products, or that try to develop technology that never comes to fruition.
The tech is impressive, but that doesn't lead to an assumption that it must be able to do whatever is needed. I've seen enough tech hype cycles to know them when I see them. In the end it will have great strengths and great weaknesses, and we should learn what they are.
>They are absolutely capable of looking at gestures.
But 'looking at gestures' isn't the same thing as having a real-time interpretation of the sensors. This, to the point of another comment above, may be conflating 'perception' with the larger problems of 'self-driving.'
Humans see a gesture and understand the meaning very fast because we process a lot of communication on the subconscious level. If you read the safety report of the Uber incident, it shows that the self-driving system could 'see' the pedestrian, but it struggled to effectively classify them. To be fair, that was years ago and another company, but we (as the public) don't have much insight into how good (or bad) the software is.
So 'seeing gestures,' 'correctly classifying gestures', and 'correctly classifying gestures in a time-sensitive manner' are varying levels of difficulty. The last one is the one that matters for safety-critical operations, and the requirements change with the velocity of the vehicle. IMO, there should be a regulatory framework that addresses a baseline of performance on these systems.
That comparison is a very common sales technique and fallacy: Take two products, list the things product B does better than A, and therefore B is better!
I'm not sure I get what you're saying. I'm saying the waymo is probably better than me at detecting and avoiding obstacles. That is the point of this thread.
I do want to clarify that my comment: the skateboarder would not have died. Waymo provided a larger margin of error for the board rider than a human could possibly have.
Humans cannot react very fast, this incident comes down to fast reactions and the good all around vision in the Waymo. On these measures a human isn't competitive.
And this is just something you've decided is true or...? One sensor with determinate output based on an input from a finite set, sure I won't argue with you, but in any domain with indeterminate outputs coming from inputs that are of an infinite set, there is no meaningful notion of reaction time, there are imperfect decisions made with incomplete information at a moment during the dangerous spiral of number of possible responses shrinking and information completeness growing, (should I react now or wait until I have more information about how effective each of the dwindling number of path s available to me are shrinking) too name just one complexity.
I believe that we will get there and sooner than skeptics believe, but we are so far away from machines having driving skill equal to that of the average human driver, who happens to be driving while distracted 99% of the time.
Here an objective difference is described: a Waymo vehicle reacted to new visual information in a direction that a human driver would not be likely to be looking.
The yellow diamond with a black stripe puts you into "French priority to the right" mode and it's not restricted to France, it's pretty common across the continent.
> I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain.
As opposed to what? You don’t have RADAR, or LIDAR, or echolocation, or any other way to “detect” a person in the road. You have human vision.
This is the idea behind Tesla FSD. If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough. We have cameras that can approximate human vision. All the other companies using sensors are doing so as a crutch, because they didn’t have the chops to solve the vision problem.
I really don't need LIDAR. I have roughly 3 billion years of evolution and the end result - eyes, brain etc.
LIDAR is simply a sensor and a very inferior one, in general, when compared to my visual system. For starters it needs something to interpret it. My eyes have a 52 year old brain stuffed with experience behind them and it isn't always a hindrance!
I can reason about other people's driving style and react accordingly. I can also describe my actions and reasoning on internet forums.
I really do not want an inferior sensor such as LIDAR inflicted on me, nor would I want it to be the sole source of information for something that conveys me.
Quite - I don't have those sensors but I do have madly myopic (sort of corrected) stereoscopic vision and a brain, with 30 odd years experience in it. Oh and I have ears. I generally drive with the window down in town. I can look left and listen right.
My office has an entrance onto the A37 in Yeovil (1) Bear in mind we drive on the left in the UK. Picture yourself in a car next to that for sale sign and trying to turn right. That white car will be doing 20-40 mph or much more. In the distance is a roundabout (Fiveways) which is large enough to enable a fast exit and people love to accelerate out of a roundabout. As you can also see this is a hill so the other side is quite fast because cars have to brake to keep down to the speed limit of 30 mph. That's just one scenario.
Anyway, back to your idea that Tesla FSD (Full Self Driving) ie RADAR, LIDAR etc is equivalent to "me" is debatable. I do have my limitations but I can reason about them and I can reason about what FSD might mean as well.
You assert: "If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough." People and computers/cars/whatevs do not perceive things in the same way. I doubt very much that you have two cameras with a very narrow but high res central field of view with a rather shag peripheral view which is tuned for movement. Your analogue "vision" sensors should be mounted on something that can move around (within the confines of a seatbelt). Yes I do have to duck under the rear view mirror and peer around the A pillar etc.
I have no doubt that you have something like a camera with a slack handful of Google Corals, trying to make sense of what is happening but it is really, really complicated. I actually think that your best bet is not to try to replicate my or your sensors and actions but to think outside the box.
I wonder if this will become new pedestrian behavior? Once people learn that waymo will stop for them no matter what they can just cross in front of it.
Or maybe they know they can do anything in front of the car because it will always yield. It will be interesting to see the game theory develop when most of the roads are full of driverless cars so you can gain an edge on the road risk free
I don’t know about “do anything in front of the car”… it’s still a several thousand pound mass that isn’t exempt from the laws of physics… but I for one would be MUCH more willing to be a cyclist on the road if most of the cars were autonomous vehicles behaving within the letter of the law.
Attributing every great outcome to "talent and sweat" is dangerous in safety critical domains. Often it's (at least partly) luck, and missing that distinction (combined with a lot of human biases) can make a team confuse "being lucky" with "being good". The problem with luck is it tends to eventually run out.
Since it seems people are interested. I had one situation which this sort of thing made me a bit uneasy (So one gripe actually). I was sitting back right seat. Waymo was waiting to make an unprotected left turn over two lanes. There was a vehicle waiting to also make an unprotected left in the other direction. Behind it was a truck. Waymo made that turn where I wouldn't have. I thought it through after and it had at least two advantages over a human here. 1. It knew the car situation behind truck well before a driver would have considered it. 2. It's front lidar could see around that truck earlier than a driver could. I still provided feedback that I'd have preferred it to not make that turn even if it was safe to do so. At the end of the day I'm the customer and I want to feel safe at all times not just be safe.
I've been in this situation, and it's something that seems to get tweaked every week.
They definitely pushed the "aggressive" lever up a little over the last month.
I think it's one of those cases where it's sort of obvious it can calculate trajectories and speeds much better than a human, so it's a safe manoeuvre in theory, but it "feels" bad as a passenger.
Same thing for where it can see that it can squeeze through a tight "lane" but a normal human driver would probably wait until the oncoming traffic had passed.
It's a lose lose situation. I've been reading conversation about self driving cars for years and what you always heard back in the days is that they were way too conservative on these kinds of turns and blocked traffic. Hell even in this very thread people are saying that about Cruise. Yet when they make it more aggressive, people feel unsafe.
As you say, this is something they are constantly tweaking to find the perfect middle ground. That being said, maybe people are extra hyper aware of the turns when it's a self driving car, and wouldn't bat an eye or pay attention if it was a normal taxi driver?
People have an interesting “trust curve” regarding automation. At first they’ll be very suspicious and critical of it and any issues they have will be blamed on it. Then some point later when they’re used to the system, this attitude will suddenly flip around and they’ll start regarding the system as infallible. Sounds like this might be happening here.
Fair point. When I take a passenger in a Waymo and it is there first time I'm hyper aware of the driving. But for myself personally, I'm mostly tuned out. For me it started to feel "normal" as early as about the 4th ride. So they could probably subtly adjust the "middle ground" based on the passenger's experience and feedback (As long as it doesn't create inconsistencies for surrounding vehicles).
The thing is, the capabilities are not likely to be a strict superset of a human's.
So, if you make it have the same aggressiveness on "average" by having it take advantage of its superior capabilities, those situations are going to feel sketchy to a person.
You should be able to set the "aggressive" level. I believe Tesla has this option internally on their FSD Beta. Hopefully you will be able to set this level for robot taxis and personal vehicles like you can with (some) human drivers.
Call me cynical, but this feels like a way for tech companies to absolve themselves of responsibility.
“Your Honor, the pedestrian would have never been struck if the driver had set the system in its most conservative mode as we suggest on page 1,047 of Terms and Conditions.” /s
When a Tesla can accelerate to 60 mph in less than 2 seconds, knowing the instantaneous velocity and acceleration is not very meaningful. You really need to be able to predict what the acceleration profile will look like over the next N seconds of your maneuver. Holding the currently perceived velocity and acceleration constant over the next N seconds is one naive way to do that. But the actual set of possible trajectories of the other actor is much larger, and you need to drive more conservatively to account for that.
If your sensors can distinguish a Vespa from a sports bike reliably, compared to all the other things that an autonomous vehicle has to cope with programming it to treat those two as different categories of vehicle shouldn’t be particularly hard.
> at least to the precision that it would differ in the next 10 seconds.
10 seconds? 10 seconds is an eternity.
Some vehicles of similar size might be more than 1/8th of a mile apart in straight line performance in 10 seconds-- let alone the difference once we've got multidimensional vectors.
My point is-- vehicle dynamics only make a difference in the very short term, because after like a couple of seconds, vehicles can be almost anywhere relative to you even with low performance.
(But, they can be quite different on the timescale of a second).
it only takes 0.2 seconds to turn a motorcyclist into ground beef
If you can't tell apart a bicycle from a 4-cylinder racing bike, let alone a vespa, that's what happnes. And Tesla can't. It also can't read hand signals given by cyclists. It can't tell apart a donkey and a horse.
I've been saying that vehicle dynamics is useful information in the short term. So if you're trying to argue with me, I don't think you've understood my point.
If your goal was to interject an anti-Tesla offtopic comment to the general discussion of vehicle dynamics, it was unwelcome.
Humans are terrible at high velocity estimates. That's one of the conditions described in the accident investigation report for that Irish plane which smashed a bunch of runway lighting due to insufficient take off power.
A brand new top of the line passenger jet would say e.g. "Caution: Acceleration" because it can work out the velocity of the plane, from there the acceleration and the remaining runway length (it uses GPS to identify the runway it's on) and take off speed and conclude we won't make it. Humans only decide that after it's far too late. Because it's much earlier the annunciation allows pilots to abort takeoff and investigate from the safety of the ground - in the Irish case they'd typed the wrong air temperature in and thus the engine performance was much worse than expected, with the right air temp it would have flown just fine
LOL. Tell race car drivers and truckers that they're inferior. Their senses are probably tuned just as finely as any vision system. You really discount non-quantitative measurements - as most tech people here do. You are wrong, though, that the best of the meat brains are so inferior.
It is also very important to consider the effect on other drivers.
A self driving car might calculate it can squeeze through a gap in oncoming traffic but doing so probably will cause human drivers of those cars to slam the breaks and create a large crash.
So unless they’re driving on a road where only self driving is allowed they’ll probably need to be much more conservative than they can be.
Also thinking about it, the first roads to become robot-only driven will probably be inner city streets where pedestrians abound, so no aggressive driving there either.
I'm laughing because I know that intersection well from taking my kids to basketball practice. I might have had the opposite reaction to you had my car not gone when it could. Also, you have greater visibility as a driver in the front than a passenger in the back, so it's likely that an experienced SF driver might have also done the same thing (speaking as someone who's driven in the city for over 20 years)
I get your point. But the approach to the situation differs I think. A human driver would creep into the intersection to get a better view and then go if clear. The Waymo proceeded with far more confidence. Just better vision. It starting tracking vehicles earlier than a human would (this is shown in a simplified way on the display inside - but I wasn't watching in this case). As it pulled into the intersection, it's front camera and/or lidar has a much better angle than a human driver so can make a go/no-go assessment earlier and without hesitation.
I suspect a lot of the concern could be handled by having the car display a map of moving things that it will interact with and it's projection of encounter times/distances.
Another fun anecdote. When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once (I'm not sure they still do this). But it wasn't implemented very well at some point since the Waymo I was in was behind another one for many blocks. The wipers went at least 17 times. As an earlier adopter I provided lots of feedback. Even little things like I tried working on a laptop in the back* and when I went to type in my 1password password I reached up to cover the camera that is positioned perfectly to see my keystrokes.
* Not recommended in SF. But I imagine on the 280 it would be great one day.
The start stop traffic gave me car sickness quickly. The 280 is a 4 lane highway that, at certain times of day, adaptive cruise control gets very little workout.
May be actually getting better over time. A lot of the screen-related car sickness goes away with the refresh rate bumped up to 120Hz. These are slowly arriving to not-completely-gaming laptops fortunately.
Car sickness happens when reading a book as well. It's your inner ear being out of sync with what you are witnessing. Which is why looking out the front window helps.
There's more than one reason for the sickness to kick in. It can happen with a book, but for some people a slow refresh rate -vs- book or high refresh rate makes a massive difference.
I was genuinely curious, haven't lived in the bay since 2011 and it seemed like it could be shifting. When I lived in the central coast it was a clear shibboleth when meeting people.
> Another fun anecdote. When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once (I'm not sure they still do this).
What is your motivation here? I can see why some think it looks like promotional material.
What do you even mean by motivation? If it's true (though it's probably a sensor error), it's perfectly reasonable to mention. And lying about it would be ridiculous. What scenario is there where you're worried about bad motivation here? It's not unrealistic for someone to like the idea.
It sounds promotional, having little other value. But the question wasn't answered; instead it was attacked - a good way to avoid answering a question. Oh well.
That's because you asked a question with no valid answer.
Seriously, what would you accept as being an innocent response? Anything equivalent to "I thought it was neat" is apparently not good enough since that sentiment was already in the previous post.
If you want to accuse them of being a shill, just do it directly. (But only if you have a good enough reason to break the rule against doing so.) Don't do this roundabout "what's your motivation" thing where you implicitly reject the innocent motivation.
And why would it need to have "other value"?
> a good way to avoid answering
Since I'm the only one that responded, are you suggesting I'm in cahoots with them? Come on, dude.
a) Share some anecdotes as I was lucky enough to get early access by simply applying through the app. b) I'm a believer/early adopter and as such I guess I've enjoyed sharing my experiences.
It turned out I was wrong about the windscreen wipers. LIDAR from other vehicle tripping the rain sensors.
In any event, I do wish Waymo the very best. They aren't just trying to do something hard, they are doing it whilst getting lots of opposition from SF gov. Whether the business model works - time will tell.
That is interesting to me. Not that you shouldn't be one, or that such an attitude is new to the world, but I always wonder: Why care about a for-profit company's product? Usually these companies don't care about anything or anyone else.
> When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way
I hate “whimsical” stuff like this. Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.
It is however, interesting to me to confirm they are aware of other AVs and can sync with them, enable better safety, and potentially could optimize routing through traffic with the combined data. Imagine if the car in front could warn the car behind of an incident, enabling it to take action before a human driver would even be aware of the incident.
> Imagine if the car in front could warn the car behind of an incident
They can, that is why cars have all this pretty lights in the back! They can warn of several things, like intention of turning, braking, accidents, is amazing.
And it works wonders if the human driver focus on the trafic ahead of the car just in front
Yeah, the lights in the back of your car can warn of exactly four things:
- The car is going to turn left (one blinking yellow light)
- The car is going to turn right (one blinking yellow light)
- The car is stopping (three solid red lights)
- An unspecified error occurred (two blinking yellow lights).
It's not exactly a high - bandwidth form of communication. Most of the purpose of the lights behind your car is to remind other human drivers of your continued existence. As you point out, some of this deficiency can be made up by not looking at them.
Imagine a world where you could automatically talk over an intercom with the driver in front of you about traffic conditions. I bet you'd find safer, better-informed driving. Self-driving cars make that theoretically easy and humanly pleasant.
I disagree strongly, I want more personality in the people and things I see in life. Even if I'm not a fan of someone's sense of humour I can appreciate an attempt at levity and whimsy.
That is actually an interesting question. We track how many accidents the automated cars cause, but I'm not sure how many accidents they prevent are tracked.
> by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles
Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty.
Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement.
Tesla just announced 500 million miles driven by FSD [1]. Per the video, were it fully autonomous they could have a 95% CI on "safer than human" at only 275 million miles [2], but obviously having human supervision ought to remove many of the worst incidents from the dataset. Does anyone know if they publish disengagement data?
This just shows how statistics can mislead. I own a Tesla with FSD and it's extremely unsafe for city driving. Just to quantify, I'd say at its absolute best, about 1 in 8 left turns result in a dangerous error that requires me to retake control of the car. There is no way it even comes close to approaching the safety of a human driver.
The caveats are missing the point that FSD is very obviously less safe than a human driver, unless you constrain the data to long stretches of interstate road during the day, with nice weather, clearly marked road lines and minimal construction. At that point, my "intuition" tells me human drivers probably still safer, but under typical driving conditions they very obviously are (at least with Tesla FSD, I don't know about Waymo)
The reason why I spent 3/4 of my post on caveats was because I didn't want people to read my post as claiming that FSD was safe, and instead focus on my real point that the unthinkable numbers from the video aren't actually unthinkable anymore because Tesla has a massive fleet. You're right, though, I could have spent 5/6 of my post on caveats instead. I apologize for my indiscretion.
FSD's imperfections and supervision do not invalidate their fleet's size and its consequent ability to collect training data and statistics (eventually, deaths per mile statistics). The low fleet size assumption in the presentation is simply toast.
If I had claimed that the 500 million number indicated a certain level of deaths-per-mile safety, that would be invalid -- but I spent 3/4 of my post emphasizing that it did not, even though you keep pretending otherwise.
Tesla's mileage numbers are meaningless because the human has to take over frequently. They claim credit for miles driven, but don't disclose disconnects and near misses.
California companies with real self driving have to count their disconnects and report all accidents, however minor, to DMV. You can read the disconnect reports online.
Do you think they lied about miles driven in the investor presentation?
Nah, that would be illegal. Their statement leaves plenty of room for dirty laundry though. I'm sure they won't disclose disengagement data unless forced, but they have plenty of legal battles that might force them to disclose. That's why I'm asking around. I'd love to rummage through. Or, better, to read an article from someone else who spent the time.
Your video and my response were talking about fatal crashes. Humans don't go 100 million miles between crashes.
Has FSD had a fatality? Autopilot (the lane-follower) has had a few, but I don't think I've heard about one on FSD, and if their presentations on occupancy networks are to be believed there is a pretty big distinction between the two.
Isn't "FSD" the thing they're no longer allowed to call self driving because it keeps killing cyclists? Google suggests lots of Tesla+cyclist+dead but with Tesla claiming it's all fine and not their fault, which isn't immediately persuasive.
> Google suggests lots of Tesla+cyclist+dead but with Tesla claiming it's all fine and not their fault, which isn't immediately persuasive.
With human drivers -- are we blaming Tesla for those too?
You do you, but I'm here to learn about FSD. It looks like there was a public incident where FSD lunged at a cyclist. See, that's what I'm interested in, and that's why I asked if anyone knew about disengagement stats.
It appears that the clever trick is to have the automated system make choices that would be commercially unfortunate - such as killing the cyclist - but to hand control back to the human driver just before the event occurs. Thus Tesla are not at fault. I feel ok with blaming Tesla for that, yeah.
The Reporting Entity’s report of the highest-
level driving automation system engaged at
any time during the period 30 seconds
immediately prior to the commencement of
the crash through the conclusion of the
crash. Possible values: ADAS, ADS,
“Unknown, see Narrative.”
> The new data set stems from a federal order last summer requiring automakers to report crashes involving driver assistance to assess whether the technology presented safety risks. Tesla‘s vehicles have been found to shut off the advanced driver-assistance system, Autopilot, around one second before impact, according to the regulators.
Can someone summarize the video? That was my first thought as well: crash data for humans is clearly underreported. For example, police don't always write reports or human drivers agree to keep it off the books.
The probability of a human driver causing a fatality on any given mile driven is 0.00000109% (1.09 fatalities occur per 100 million miles driven).
Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly.
This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years.
And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver.
Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on.
Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents.
Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.
Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.
In a similar vein, if we put geo-informed speed governors in cars that physically prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit, fatalities would also likely plummet.
I'm fine with it notifying the driver it thinks you might be speeding, but I don't like the idea of actually limiting the speed of the car. I've used several cars which had a lot of cases where it didn't track the speed right. Driving near but not in a construction zone. Driving in an express lane which has a faster posted speed than the main highway. School zones. I've seen cars routinely get these things wrong. A few months ago I was on an 85 MPH highway and Google Maps suddenly thought I was on the 45 MPH feeder. Add 20%, that's 54 MPH max speed. So what, my car would have quickly enforced the 30 MPH drop and slam on the brakes to get it into compliance?
I'd greatly prefer just automatic enforcement of speeding laws rather than doing things to try and prevent people from speeding.
Honestly I would think something like transponders on every freeway would work better than GPS. Regardless, I think everyone in the thread could think of 10 technological ways of making this work. I think the biggest barriers are political, not logistical, and definitely not engineering.
So we spend a ton of money putting in transponders and readers in cars which still have various failure modes, or we just put cameras on the highways and intersections and say "car with tag 123123 went from gate 1 to gate 2 in x minutes, those are y miles apart, average speed had to be > speed limit, issue ticket to 123123".
The toll roads could trivially automatically enforce speed limits. They already precisely know when each car goes through each gantry, they know the distance between each gantry, so they know everyone's average speed.
Yeah, because need to be able to use your vehicle to escape pursuers and also as a ramming weapon. I assume police would get an exception from this rule, but they don't actually have more of a legal right to use their vehicle as a weapon than anyone else, they are just less likely to be questioned on their judgement of the situation as an emergency by the DA. Probably also a second amendment violation, but the Supreme Court might be too originalist (and not textualist enough) to buy that argument, as cars did not exist in the decades surrounding the founding.
I sustained traumatic injuries a few months ago when a driver on a suspended learner's permit hit me. The lazy cop issued no tickets for the multiple traffic violations. He couldn't be bothered to show up for the trial and the lazy prosecutor who only notified me of the trial three days in advance went with a bare minimum wrist slap for the suspension. It's as if it officially never happened.
That's awful. The amount of egregious vehicular violence the US has tolerated is disgusting. Waymo seems like the best bet to making experiences like yours a thing of the past.
Odometers are pretty well regulated and insurance companies will often have a good record of the readings over long periods. I'm not sure how the org doing the data collection does it precisely, but pretty accurate data is out there.
It would be interesting if some kind of active/inductive measurement could be made.
As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky.
No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!
Although things are changing, the overwhelming majority of AV miles are generally-safer miles on protected highways. And yet their statistics are typically compared against vehicle miles on all road types.
Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way.
But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.
Human drivers "disengage" also, though we don't think of it that way. I have aging friends who refuse to drive at night. I'll stay home in bad weather. When I was younger, I'd sometimes ask a passenger to back out of tricky parking space for me.
It's not too useful to lump Tesla, Cruise, and Waymo together here. Tesla is years behind Cruise and cruise is years behind Waymo in terms of driving capability. Waymo doesn't even drive on highways, so we don't know how safe it would be (probably very safe).
>Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding
the bigger problem here is that the machine may not realize it isn't fully understanding the situation; I think that's the more common situation : a computer situational model doesn't match reality, but the machine has the confidence in perception to proceed, producing dangerous effects.
Not sure that's fair - the number of accidents in human-driven vehicles varies significantly by the human driving it. Do you compare with the teen that just obtained their license and is more interested in their phone than in driving properly, or the 65-year old doctor who's been driving for work and other purposes every day for the past 40 years? According to https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr... it's at least a 6x difference.
You compare what matters — mean accidents per mile driven. And like any actuary, you can compare distributions with finer granularity data (location, tickets, ages, occupations, collusion severity, etc). None of this is new or intractable. We can have objective standards with confident judgements of what’s safe for our roads.
As an aside, public acceptance of driverless cars is another story. A story filled with warped perspectives due to media outlets stoking the audience emotions which keep outlets in business — outrage, fear, and drama. For every story covering an extreme accident involving human drivers, there might be 100 stories covering a moderate driverless accident. No matter how superhuman autonomous cars perform, they’ll have a massive uphill battle for a positive image.
I think you compare it to the average as that's who you are encountering when on the road. You have no way of selecting the other drivers to bias toward the doctor.
Teens who’ve just gotten their license are often quite good drivers. It’s after that when they drive poorly. (This also applies to adults, to a lesser extent.)
Well, obviously the number of autonomous vehicles involved in accidents is going to be lower, but that's because barely any of them exist compared to the vast majority of people driving their cars. If you had statistics on proportions though, that might be a different story.
You missed "per distance travelled" - that partially normalises the results. You still have to adjust for situation and road type (which Tesla conveniently doesn't do in their advertised numbers) for a better result.
I’ve had several low-light situations where my Tesla identified a pedestrian and applied the brakes before I did (typically dark clothing on a dark street).
Sure, it’s just more evidence that these automated systems improve overall safety vs. an unassisted driver. (Although I worry a bit about automation-induced inattention negating these benefits)
There are also issues like phantom braking which Teslas are prone to (or were, I'm not sure if that's better these days). That's part of a whole class of problems which the AVs suffer from which humans don't. I think the main problem is that those problems are really unpredictable to human drivers, whereas good defensive drivers will take into account what another lousy human driver might do based on lots of experience.
On the other hand, if you’re following the car in front of you too close so you cannot react to phantom breaking, the accident is on you. One of the things I appreciate the most about using autopilot/FSD everywhere is that the car maintains a safe following distance basically 100% of the time, even when someone cuts me off. Implemented (and used) consistently, this sort of adaptive cruise control by itself should solve a bunch of accident-causing hazards and other traffic issues.
I haven’t had a phantom breaking issue in a long time either, I’m not sure if this is because of the FSD package or if the underlying autopilot system has improved.
Ditto, FWIW. The car may not always behave like a human does in those circumstances[1], but at this point it's objectively much better at the attention and recognition side of the task.
[1] It tends to be more conservative than human drivers, and in weird ways. If a pedestrian seems at all to be moving in the direction of traffic, even if they're on a sidewalk and just meandering a bit, the car will try to evade (not violently, but it will brake a bit and pull to the outside of the lane).
My point was not about discerning track from grass, but about driving in acttual grass. Current self-driving tech uses sensors that are useless in high grass.
As for "emergency behavior" (emergent behavior, I guess) - we do not know how LLMs are trained. Thus, what you consider "emergency behavior," could very well be a part of training.
This is such an odd take I don’t know if it’s trolling. Both can be measured against similar metrics (an AV model against the avg AV/avg human or vice versa.
The companies do track that data internally. It would be nice if the DMV mandated it's release to the public. But of course this type of data is a counterfactual, so much more subjective.
You say this but as a motorcyclist I've learned to have my eyes everywhere. I suspect many others would say the same. You acclimate to the vehicle you most often control: if that's some woolly handling sluggish SUV then I suspect, no, you probably wouldn't have done well in this situation, but if you were more used to driving a vehicle that requires more attention I suspect you'd do better.
Fair point. For more context the waymo just made the right turn and there was a line of cars in front moving slowly or still. The skateboarder was crouched down and going fast between the cars and the gutter (against traffic). Perhaps from the driver's seat you'd get a glimpse of the skateboarder but it would be very late. No other cars in front made any adjustments. I did hear the skateboarder as it went by.
Maybe this is a fluke, but a few months ago an ABC reporter documented her Waymo ride and it had a couple goof ups. https://youtu.be/-Rxvl3INKSg
Ultimately, I don't think the driving screw ups were that big of a deal (just my opinion). The big deal though is the moronic lack of customer support. How hard is it really to have a customer support staff a phone call away that can reassure the customer and either debug the issue to get them sorted out or at least offer alternatives. It would do so much to improve the users perception.
So, typical Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service.
Maybe it was a just hit piece though and they cut out some contextual video? No idea.
> Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service
How can a company with THAT MUCH MONEY be THAT plagued with an issue that everyone has been shouting about for more than a decade ??
I wonder if there is a business model in contracting in Google's customer care. I'm sure someone could do a lot better with Google's customer budget. Google can start off with a few departments, and then have performance based expansion. If it goes too well, they can always get acquired in.
Being a losing member of the cloud race after inventing every modern systems paradigm is profitable ? Missing the entire LLM/Diffusion cycle despite having laid the groundwork for it is profitable ?
Their peer tech companies - MSFT, AAPL, AMZN all managed to become industry leaders into a completely different sector while maintaining their moat in their original revenue sources.
Google is still only makes money on ads. Google has created a monster products in B2C search, ads and software platforms. But, their B2C services are lagging far behind, and customer service really helps here.
Seriously, anyone here who rides motorcycles can pipe in, but some of us out there never assume anything on the road and thusly avoid a lot of trouble because of it. Assuming incorrectly is the root cause of probably 99.999% of accidents.
There's driving without attention, there's defensive driving, and then there's ability to react to things which would be physically impossible for people to react to. You can train all you want (and yes, that will improve your survival rate significantly), but the eyes->brain->muscles->movement->car->inertia pipeline has delays we will never be able to work around.
In the real world reacting effectively is less about reflexes and more about situational awareness, anticipating what might happen, and reacting not just quickly but properly when something sudden does occur.
I think in that space ML will beat us completely. It's basically a simple optimisation problem of: these rules improve safety, here's the situation you're in, maximise rules applied and minimise changes required to apply them, repeat. The number of ideas ML can remember, test and execute is not going to be comparable with what people can do. It all relies on getting appropriate data from sensors though.
>Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all.
i'm sure this is sometimes true, but at least sometimes i'd guess that the route selections would make more sense if you saw the conditions and traffic on the route the car didn't take you on.
If this ever happens to you or anyone else here, drop them a message with the date/time/place that it happened, and they will watch the footage and probably adjust stuff to not be scary in the future. Without human feedback, it's really hard to program a machine to understand "scary", even if the machine has calculated that it won't hit you.
The Jaguar iPace is a full 4-door SUV, not a hatchback or a Rav4. Just because the rear hatch tapers down doesn't make the car smaller from a safety standpoint.
Jaguar iPace: 4800lbs, 79inch wide, 183 inches long
Pacifica: 4500lbs, 79inch wide, 204 inches long
Toyota Highlander: 4400lbs, 76inches wide, 194 inches long
Chevy Bolt: 3500lbs, 69inches wide, 163 inches long
The iPace might be great for LA but for SF it's totally inappropriate.
That's my experience, having been on FSD beta for almost two years now. It's still "un-human-driver-like" in a bunch of surprising ways, but the actual meat and potatoes "does it do more or less stupid stuff" is I think ahead of my own driving at this point.
At this point I trust its microdriving (lanekeeping, distance management, speed control, collision/obstacle avoidance, etc...) more than my own for sure. The higher level stuff is still a mixed bag (will it get stuck at that merge, can it make this lane change in time, does it understand that this other car is going to yield or will it stop, etc...).
Meh, we've been here before. That's a vague and impossible point to argue. I mean, sure, yes it does. Does it for all possible obstacles? Probably not? I certainly haven't tested. This kind of "$SYSTEM must have feature $X which is possessed by $COMPETITOR or else it will fail" is just plain bad analysis. It's possible for a Tesla to (1) be a better driver than you on the whole while still (2) doing weird stuff that you're sure you never would.
FWIW: Stationary junk in the freeway causes accidents with human drivers every day, all the time. People are absolutely terrible at dodging crap in the road. But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd *never* drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would.
Basically: no, you'll never get the evidence you want to "prove" the logical construct you've created. So Teslas, to you, will never be "safe". But in the real world they obviously are.
You're making guesses about my standards that aren't warranted at all. They absolutely can be met.
First off I'm specifically worried about large objects, a meter or larger.
And let's see, autopilot has done 3 billion miles? Okay, if FSD can manage 1 billion miles of freeway driving with zero or one crashes into large objects, then I'll be convinced they're solving the problem.
That should be fair, right?
> But in the real world they obviously are.
Obvious according to what?
Autopilot wasn't, because it managed to hit entire vehicles repeatedly. There is (or was) a specific warning in the manual that it might hit stationary vehicles when going over 50mph.
What makes it obvious that FSD avoids this specific problem?
> But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd never drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would.
You made this up about me from nowhere. Please never do that to anyone.
> You're making guesses about my standards that aren't warranted at all. They absolutely can be met. First off I'm specifically worried about large objects, a meter or larger.
I've personally watched my car go around trash cans and bikes in the road, and (obviously) stop for halted vehicles. So, you'll abandon this argument and concede the point? I suspect you won't, because my anecdote isn't enough for you, and those obstacles aren't sufficient proof, etc...
I think I'm more right than you want to admit. There's nothing I can say here to change your mind, and so coming here and demanding "evidence" isn't really an argument in good faith.
And an edit just to pick on this bit:
> Okay, if FSD can manage 1 billion miles of freeway driving with [emphasis in original] zero or one crashes into large objects, then I'll be convinced they're solving the problem.
That's simply a ridiculous argument. That level of safety is way, way, WAY beyond anything you get from existing transportation systems of any kind, period. A quick google shows that in that "one billion miles on the freeway", you'd expect not merely the "one accident" you're demanding, but in fact TWENTY FATALITIES (I couldn't find statistics for mere collisions, but needless to say it's going to be at least an order of magnitude or two higher).
So basically you're sitting here and glibly demanding that this product be 200x safer than its competitors before you'll consider it acceptable... and getting huffy when I call you unserious?
> So, you'll abandon this argument and concede the point? I suspect you won't, because my anecdote isn't enough for you, and those obstacles aren't sufficient proof, etc...
Are you trolling with this?
I'm asking if it can reliably do that. Of course I need more data than one person can collect. I am not being unreasonable to ask for more data than your personal experience. Most people with autopilot never saw this problem either.
And specifically I need to know about freeway speeds, because speed is an important factor.
There is plenty you could do to change my mind. If you link to something published by tesla or a government body showing autopilot and FSD accident rates by type then that would be more than enough.
> So basically you're sitting here and glibly demanding that this product be 200x safer than its competitors before you'll consider it acceptable
I'm not asking for a lack of fatalities. I'm asking for a lack of hitting stationary vehicle-scale objects on the freeway.
Do you think that particular kind of accident is responsible for a majority of fatalities, or something? My expectation is that it's a very rare kind of accident and I also feel like it's a good canary.
Also the freeway fatality rate is about 5.4 per billion miles, not 20.
It's so amazing how this discussion goes every single time.
> I'm not asking for a lack of fatalities. I'm asking for a lack of hitting stationary vehicle-scale objects on the freeway.
Exactly! You've constructed an impossible gateway to understanding; I either find a statistic to fit exactly your imagined failure mode or... I'm wrong, and you don't need to change your opinion.
I'm, sorry, I truly am, that I don't have a statistic to hand you showing the frequency with which Tesla vehicles with FSD beta hit 1m+ stationary obstacles on high speed roadways. I don't. And I won't, and likely never will.
So, again getting to the point upthread: you're safe. You can't lose this argument framed like that, and I concede that point. I'm just saying that that's not a very serious position to take if you're actually interested in genuine safety using metrics that other people care about.
> Also the freeway fatality rate is about 5.4 per billion miles, not 20.
Not the headline I saw immediately, but sure. That sounds plausible too. The fact that you want to claw back an error factor of 200 by 3.5x is also good evidence that you aren't taking the discussion seriously.
> The fact that you want to claw back an error factor of 200 by 3.5x
I don't. Again, I wasn't talking about total accident rate at all. I was talking about a much smaller number. The "200" is nonsense and that was just another reason it's wrong.
> So, again getting to the point upthread: you're safe. You can't lose this argument framed like that, and I concede that point. I'm just saying that that's not a very serious position to take if you're actually interested in genuine safety using metrics that other people care about.
Ugh. Look, I can wait for general safety statistics, but it will take longer. Those will exist, and they can convince me if they're within 2x of humans.
Maybe it's unfair for me to want specific statistics here, but it shouldn't be so hard to get them.
But it's just as unfair for you to act like a single person's anecdotes are enough. You can't just say it's "obviously" safe and treat that like a real argument. Of course the discussion is going to go the same way every time if that's the level of evidence you expect people to accept.
And I thought you were claiming that no evidence could convince me because I'm unreasonable. If your real claim is "nobody has bothered to collect much evidence, therefore there is no way to convince you without doing that job" then yes I agree and I don't think that's my problem.
I rode in an Argo car (RIP) and it avoided an accident where everyone in the car was like "where did that guy come from". It saw at an awkward angle around the corner before any human could have.
I have doubts of the claim you have made. The Waymo just turned up a hill and moved out of the way of a downhill skateboarder? What is it about that that makes it something that no human could do? Was the Waymo's vision blocked before making the turn? As that's the time to determine the turn is safe.
Also, isn't there an implicit assumption that all Waymo "drivers" would perform in exactly the same way?
I’m reasonably sure I’ve done things like that. I wouldn’t need the mirror check because I would already know what’s there during the right turn. However I would personally aim to stay dead center in lane to reduce the skateboarder’s uncertainty during their own tricky maneuver.
This isn’t to say the Waymo car did a bad job. It sounds like a good choice in the situation.
> It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic.
Wonder what it would have done if it didnt have room to pull into the left lane without hitting a car. Or perhaps another skateboarder.
Based on this recent-ish YT [1] video Waymo is also crap, just as Cruise is, as any car that stops at a green light, on the left-lane, is a danger to all the other drivers it shares the road with.
There's a lot of legitimate criticism in that short video but the presenter is also extremely dishonest and biased. E.g. they end the video saying that they started with "a lot of optimism" when at the beginning of the ride they literally said that they expected the car to be unsafe. They also seem to mock the AI for obeying traffic laws like speed limits and stop signs, which is a bad start for a video like this.
Someone in the comments also mentions that the destination was in a dead end street, which may be the reason the drop-off is a 5 minute walk away. The 5 minute walk was also apparently indicated when she entered the destination. This along with the pick-up location being on the other side of the road feels like it might be the result of the AI being overly cautious. I'd find that acceptable for an "autonomous car" but not one advertised as a replacement for taxis (which as the presenter mentions are also used as accessibility aids where a 5 minute walk uphill can be unacceptable).
There's no footage of the car stopping at the green light, just her saying it's come to a full stop and then an external shot where it's already stopped. That's not enough information to call the stop "unsafe", even if it was impeding traffic. It also stopped with flashing hazards, assuming Waymo doesn't flash hazards during the entire ride (which I hope they don't). It's not clear why it stopped there but based on the little footage we have it doesn't seem very abrupt so any traffic behind it would have had plenty of time to notice and react the decelerating car in front of them.
The stop seems unnecessary and because it's AI and Waymo didn't provide additional information, it's impossible to say what caused it. The message she saw also indicates it was caused by an error, presumably a navigation issue. Although it is impossible to tell based on the editing, the issue seems to have been resolved within a few seconds. A human driver would have probably decided to just follow the direction of traffic for that amount of time, or change lines to come to a full stop at the side of the road but in an urban environment (not at highway speeds) the behavior is not completely unreasonable. What's more concerning to me is that the AI ran into a problem while in traffic that required the car to come to a complete halt and presumably wait for external (human?) intervention, green light or none.
I'd prefer a car that slowly comes to a full stop at a green light because of a software issue over one that keeps dragging a pedestrian it ran over for several seconds to avoid impeding traffic but the bigger issue with Waymo here is that the car runs into a software issue at all while in traffic.
Have you ever driven in a congested city? Someone stopping out of the blue when green is on is definitely a danger to all those around the car he/she/it is driving. Granted, that might not be the case somewhere in the middle of the US where there's a car passing every 5-10 minutes or so.
From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably.
I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday.
I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic.
2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways.
This was a good day, FWIW.
Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either.
EDIT:
This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)?
Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse.
I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car.
I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.
That said, I don't know if the average human drives acceptably, and I'm very skeptical of a "99%" estimate, but I will say that I would prefer a fleet that consistently drove at the 40%ile of human quality vs. the current human fleet that follows the normal distribution.
If self-driving cars reach 40%ile quality, and enable us to stop the 20% worst drivers from driving (or average drivers when operating at 20%ile due to being drunk or tired), that'd be a huge win for safety.
Right now it's socially unacceptable to increase the difficulty of getting your license, or to take it away for poor performance, because cars are a necessity or near-necessity in most places. If we could provide self-driving vehicles as a fallback, perhaps we could make it easier to permanently lose your license than—checks local laws—repeatedly killing people by driving while intoxicated[0].
Yes, this is a difficult problem. When I do see the 1%ers changing lanes at 90mph without blinkers, or not using headlights; I long for stricter, automated enforcement. Points, then a suspended license.
But I also recognize that many people, having the suspended license, must now choose between never leaving home or driving with a suspended license.
I feel like better public transit, more than Self-driving cars (which will be expensive to actually own) is the answer here.
We need to lower the cost to an individual of losing driving privilege, so that we can lower the cost to society from bad drivers.
Further, you kind of assume human drivers are going to do these dangerous things, so you can anticipate them. It's more important to be predictable than to be conservative/safe.
Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.
> it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.
Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.
Now I’m just imagining endless gridlock because an AV randomly stops mid highway, and all the other AVs reasonably stop, creating waves of backup. And this happening on a fairly frequent intermittent cycle.
Big is different, and scaling this kind of thing to majority of vehicles on the road can cause all sorts of interesting problems.
I’m not saying it’s inevitable; sure, we can and most likely will improve things on the long road to majority AV. This simply occurred to me and I hadn’t seen it articulated before so thought I’d share.
It is better than what most people do now: just keep driving hoping things are safe. If AVs are regularly stopping on the highway that implies there is a problem with the road design.
Why is a typical human driver at typical performance the baseline? The bad outcomes from driving come from the poor end of the performance, if the average autonomous vehicle avoids those long tail bad outcomes, some inconveniences like slow turns etc is a very worthy tradeoff.
Autonomous vehicles don't get drunk or sleepy, don't speed, don't leave the scene of an accident...
In a sane world, the existence of shitty human drivers would not be an excuse for lowering the bar for self-driving cars. It would be a reason to start treating a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roadways as a privilege rather than a right.
> This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)?
> That seems like a comically bad baseline.
Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k.
The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline.
If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die.
We should do our best to keep standards high and increase them as technology permits, but there is no reasonable way to avoid using the current numbers as a baseline.
I think the better question is why we try to replace cars 1 to 1, even if it is in terms of mileage rather than number of vehicles. The problem isn't just drivers, the problem is cars. For most trips there are superior technological alternatives, there's just no political motivation to implement them because infrastructure is boring and it's easier to justify throwing more money at roads in the short term than investing in long term urban renewal projects to build and expand tram networks, underground transit, dedicated bus lanes and bicycle-first road networks. Especially now that the idea of "walkable neighborhoods" has cynically become a culture war issue rather than something that's objectively improving quality of life while reducing emissions and resource waste.
We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. The only thing that seems to get enforced around where I live is speeding, and very unevenly: one time a month or so you see them out giving tickets like gangbusters. On all other days and for all other laws, it seems like the highway is a free-for-all: Stop sign rolling, running red lights, playing with your phone while driving, weaving in and out of traffic, burnouts, excessive noise, coal rolling, go right ahead--nobody is stopping you.
Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time. Police offers cost a lot of money to employ, and we have a lot of publicly accessible road space. Having officers even regularly stationed at 50% of the most common routes would probably take up a lot more manpower than they have now and that means more taxes to pay for them. Creating a dedicated traffic enforcement division is probably more doable/cheaper, but again, the amount of people needed is large. The problem is fundamentally that the US has a lot of extremely lightly regulated public space designed for high speed and that's why our pedestrian and auto safety record is so much worse than any other developed country.
The average police officer in the Bay Area costs $200k with benefits. Can each police officer bring $200k worth of fines in per person? Moreover, what kind of a system will you create if you incentivize officers to pay their own salary through fines?
If you're saying the police is massively overfunded, yeah. Officers also already often face quotas in many places, so you already know the answer to that question.
But the better question is why would you need to have overpaid humans drive around in cars to catch speeding violations? In most of Europe you almost never get stopped by cops for traffic violations. Most speeding violations are caught by stationary radar traps, a machine can run the plates and send you the ticket by mail, including a pretty picture of the driver of the car if you want to dispute who drove it. Sometimes there are similar traps activated by passing a red light. It'll even tell you how the long the light had been red when you passed it.
The reason that doesn't happen in the US is privacy regulations and because generally speaking lower income areas are less pedestrian friendly than higher income areas, so lower income areas will probably have more speeding. Not saying I agree with these reasons but it is why the political calculus in the US exists.
> We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations.
In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases.
For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.
The problem with DLRs is that it makes cars more visible. And more vulnerable traffic participants such as bikes, pedestrians, skateboarders, etc. (that mostly don't have lights) less visible by comparison.
As someone who has spent more time participating in traffic as a pedestrian and on bike than driving cars and frequently cycles between these roles this feels like a bogus argument. DLRs make cars more visible to me even when I'm not driving a car, allowing me to better anticipate their behavior. This is especially helpful with curb-side parking.
Also bikes absolutely should have lights and are required by law to have them in my country (and to have them on at night, dusk or in reduced visibility conditions). E-bikes and e-scooters also have lights which are typically always-on regardless of lighting conditions.
Pedestrians don't normally have lights (although I've seen joggers wear hi-vis vests or head lamps, especially during early morning or late night runs) but pedestrians also don't move as rapidly and suddenly as vehicles. Plus in urban environments drivers are expected to look out for pedestrians, especially in narrower roads. "Child peeking out between parked cars" is a scenario covered several times during driver ed and the practical exam includes one emergency break without prior warning (tho in practice learners can make an educated guess about when it might be coming up, e.g. being led to a low-traffic street and instructed to "pick up speed a little").
We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)
OP is talking about cars at night without any lights on. DRLs would definitely make cars at night safer than car without any lights at all.
Not to mention, I said "at least" DRLs because DRLs are a watered down version of what the European studies show as safer, which is headlights on all the time. In the US, the brightness of DRLs is limited, so the studies are shit to begin with because they're not even using the right variables to find the safest solution.
And most new cars have an auto setting for headlights (and have for a while) that most people just leave on auto. (At least for their own cars. I never totally trust what's going on with a rental although I assume it's pretty standardized at this point.)
I'd like to see those studies because both as a driver and on bike DRL makes a huge difference. Maybe less so with stroads and massive parking lots where you don't have a lot of curb-side parking and visibility is generally good.
It boggles the mind doesn't it? Since I think the 70's in the US it has been a DOT requirement for motorcycle lights to be always on when the engine is running.
I find it remarkable that we haven't done so with cars as well. It seems like a win-win-win? Automakers (and service centers) get more money replacing more headlights, the public gets safer roads, and politicians get an easy win.
I regularly see human drivers intentionally run red lights.
Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.
I don't know the last time I've seen a driver do that. The closest I've seen is a school bus/van a few months back drive through a red light after the light had already been red for a number of seconds. (I already had a green for the left turn.)
I don't even drive that much, but I've seen this behavior twice in the past week and a few more times in the past few month: Driver stopped at non-sensor intersection in straight lane. Left turn arrow turns green, straight solid red stays red. Driver starts going and proceeds straight through intersection. I'm left wondering if this is part of the general breakdown of norms following Covid, or aging boomers not caring about tickets, or what. It could just have been a spurious pattern too, of course.
Humans should be the baseline precisely because they aren't very good. Imagine a whole fleet of hundreds of self driving car that are worst than the average human driver (who are already really bad) all making the exact same worst than human mistakes.
I don't want imagination, I want real numbers! Several groups must have them, but so far nobody is talking, except those who have reason to conceal the truth. (Average drivers includes those driving drunk, which isn't a useful compare for someone who doesn't do that)
It is not hard to imagine that self driving cars are normally better except for some situation. If we can know those situations we can also talk about hybrid where we don't allow humans to drive where they are bad, and don't allow cars to drive where they are bad. However someone with real numbers needs to talk.
Every single accident involving a self driving car in California must be reported to the DMV. In addition, miles driven and disengagements are reported. All that information is available today online (e.g. accidents [1]).
> nobody is talking
No one talks data about the biggest player Waymo because "human driver causes an accident" is not news.
In September, there were three crashes involving a Waymo car. On September 3rd and again on the 11th, a driver hit a parked Waymo car[1]. On September 30th, a car rear-ended a Waymo car stopped at a red light[1].
This is such a poor use of numbers to prove a point. Any unsafe car - one - could potentially end multiple lives. Therefore, one unsafe car is unacceptable. Look up "Vision Zero". It's possible, and should be expected from our town planners, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers.
Vision zero when done correctly makes a big difference. However useful changes are often expensive so instead they do cheap things (like put up signs, and flyers) that don't really make a difference.
Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars.
We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed.
Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.
>We have the ability to do more testing and training.
This claim gets made a lot but, while I'm not sure how you would test this, I'm not really convinced that an expensive driving school and more rigorous driving test moves the needle much relative to just a lot of hours on the road and perhaps becoming more mature with age. My recollection is that my driving almost certainly approved with a year or two of driving after I got my license; you're not going to replicate that amount of driving with training/testing.
I had drivers training when I was 15. I'm now in my late 40s. How much has changed that I don't know about? I know about the zipper merge only because of an advertising push, but most drivers I know still are not aware of that. What else is new/different? I have no idea. Sure we should probably limit young drivers more (first 2 years passengers allowed only when a more experienced driver is in the passenger seat, perhaps something about low horsepower cars...), but ongoing training is completely missing from our current training and it shows.
Commercial (not private) pilots would be a good example. They regularly take refresher courses to get updated on the latest laws. They have regular simulator training so they can practice situations harder than anything they will ever encounter. They have to provide proof they are in good health. (I'm not what is legally required, or what something all airlines require but isn't legally needed).
I've seen driving simulators - not video games, but actual driving simulators. They are very good, we can require everyone spend a couple hours per year in one to show they know how to drive. We can setup situations where the other car does something stupid. We can setup situations where you will crash and have to choose the least bad crash. We can setup bikes and pedestrians to ensure that you drive safe around them. We can setup bad weather, ice on the roads. We can setup mechanical car failures. These are things that rarely happen and so you need refreshers to ensure you do the right thing should they happen to you.
I think "zero" refers to the amount of enforcement SF is willing to commit to. I commute to SF daily; I can't remember the last time I saw someone being given a ticket for a moving violation. Maybe it happens in places I don't go, but I've literally not seen it occur in the last 20 years. (Parking tickets, sure, but that's about it.) Our politicians love to pass laws and feel proud of themselves for doing so. But from where I'm sitting, I see a lot of people not caring and doing whatever they want with zero consequences.
Why blame Vision Zero for the metrics getting worse? Unless you're aware of places where all its recommendations are implemented in full, and enforced?
We don't know which over the other cars were also doing unsafe things that he didn't notice. He probably didn't see everyone talking on the phone, sending texts, and other unsafe things people do that are not always obvious.
> I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic.
Did the bike lanes have a "no parking in bike lane" sign? Because (and I learned this by getting the question wrong on my CA license test when moving here) it's not illegal to park in bike lanes in CA.
The baseline should be other engineering we trust with our lives, like planes, trains, ships, skyscrapers, and bridges. Society expects more from technology than from humans... that's why we use technology! Deaths from self-driving cars should be very minimal, every crash analyzed and understood, and findings publicly communicated and mandated.
It's worth noting that both Waymo and Cruise do report a shit load of statistics to regulatory bodies, including all incident reports. Neither company has caused a fatality to my knowledge.
They made this public immediately and it was physically impossible to avoid. It ran out basically right in front of the vehicle between some cars. A human driver would have hit the dog too unfortunately.
This is where I think edge cases favor the human driver.
Imagine driving by a playground and, instead of a dog, you see a ball roll across the street in front of your car, but you can already intuit that it is rolling fast enough that it won't be an obstacle in your lane. A human driver can intuit from the context (playground + ball) there is a chance a child may come running after that ball, from between those same cars.
While self-driving tech may be faster at 'seeing and classifying'* objects, is it able to predict from a larger context? I haven't seen much to indicate it can. I think that's where a lot of the edge cases are going to come from. Driving is more than just 'see object and make a decision'.
*Because most of the tech is relatively opaque to the public, this performance seems to be generally taken on faith. But what the Uber accident in AZ showed is that (with that system, at that time, at least) the self-driving tech really wasn't very good at classification in real-time.
While at the time the DMV did not require reporting, later when Levandowski was on trial Google / Waymo hid the video of the incident when it’s existence was finally reported on.
Assuming that self-driving cars increase the total miles driven, then we would need to pro-rate the human baseline to account for the excess deaths caused by more miles driven.
Public transit. We like to sensationalize every small problem on American buses and trains but they're also a lot safer than cars. Many countries have implemented transit systems around the world and while the US has been designed around the car shortsightedly for decades, transit is a well-understood mode with well-understood safety considerations.
Cities have been designed around cars (or their precursor - horses/horse and carts) for much longer than decades. Individual transport is universally useful; transit is an optimisation for certain situations.
Indeed and the most individual form of transport is walking and most cities in the world are built around walking. Only the US lays its cities out to require cars. It never really laid its cities for horses and carts (with the exception of Salt Lake City.) Before the car, cities were being built around the streetcar, and before that around walking. It's not like people lived in suburbs and went around in horse and buggy lol.
Why are we bringing in internet baggage here? The US lays its cities out this way due to regulations that codify this. We require that businesses have a certain amount of parking, that residential areas have a certain amount of parking. We require that homes can only be so tall, must have a certain Floor-to-Area ratio. We require that roads must be classified in a local-collector-arterial classification purely based on vehicular flow. We tell civil engineers that they should only build traffic lights if a minimum amount of pedestrian volume exists but that roads need to move a minimum number of cars by default. Sidewalks are required but not even 1/10th of the FHWA codes or the MUTCD deal with pedestrian or cyclist issues. These are all facts.
I'm not familiar with South Africa, but Australia also copied a lot of US auto-centric code regulations, so have no doubt that they did as well. But they very much aren't the norm. Most of Asia (outside of Middle Eastern cities and even here it's a mixed bag with Oman being different than the rest) and Europe are built around pedestrians.
If you think I'm just angry at the US due to some internet lefty baggage, then I don't know what to say. Japan shows that cars and pedestrians can coexist fine when you don't cater to just the car.
you're describing a goal or a requirement, not a baseline.
baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles.
Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?
That's a fine baseline if your plan is to otherwise eliminate cars.
Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win.
When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis.
We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers.
However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice.
For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.
Outperform mediocre humans means AI cars replace something shitty with something less shitty.
That means the net danger of traffic as a whole goes down.
Setting an unreasonably high bar - like "drive with perfect record" - will simply prevent that happening, and we're stuck with humans. Perfection is a north star, not an attainable goal. As long as we get net positive, the world is a tiny bit better. And then you make it a tiny bit better again. And again.
Why do you think the bar for AI should be higher than "better than what we have"?
The problem is that the bar for autonomous cars is perfection as far as public perception goes.
Right now, any incident involving a autonomous car is going to immediately be blamed on the autonomous car and not any other party, even if the fault lies entirely on the dickhead running the red light.
It won't be enough for autonomous cars to merely not cause crashes, people will expect them to actively avoid them, even in cases where a human would have failed.
The fastest way to do that is to put size limits on personal vehicles. There has been study after study showing that the larger and heavier cars get the greater the risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade.
What about the studies on deaths and injury with smaller vehicles only involving another vehicle? My guess is that it's much higher. Most families with kids want larger vehicles for exactly this reason.
I’ve got 5+ rides with each platform and would agree with this assessment. Cruise rides generally have a few uncomfortable moments per ride with some erratic swerving or sudden unexplained stops.
Waymo rides feel much more predictable and human like.
Although note that “human like” and “smooth” rides do not necessarily mean safer, but qualitatively Waymo feels that way.
My day-to-day experience with Cruises on the road is much better, mile for mile, than with human drivers.
Cruise's failures, in my view, have come broadly at the long tail where their cars stall out entirely in the road due and it cascades to other Cruises.
“The long tail” are usually what causes safety issues, though. Easily identifiable and relatively high probability events are the ones more commonly mitigated. The low-probability events are the ones that tend to fall through the cracks and tend not to be obvious except in hindsight.
Should Cruise be compared to drivers as a whole? If a subset of drivers were restricted to a max speed of 30 MPH and drove very conservatively (like most CDL holders), they too would seem safer than the public. The public as a whole includes those who cut off fellow motorists, use their phone while driving, drive while drunk/high/groggy, etc.
Yes and then go on to say something they could not possibly know for a fact. In my day to day experience Cruise cars are, mile for mile, far worse than human drivers . How could I possibly know that? I've had a couple bad encounters with Cruise cars but I've had countless encounters with human drivers in between all those. How could either of us possibly know which one is better "mile for mile." It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with "in my experience" they attempt to make it sound like they're just talking about their personal experience but then they go on to say something that sounds rather objective and _could_ be measured (but wasn't).
Scene: dopamean and their partner get home from the grocery store with a trunk full of groceries. dopamean's partner knows dopamean has had a tough week at work and wants to do something nice for them.
dopamean's partner: "Hey dopamean, in my experience, the grocery bags full of canned goods are heavier than the ones full of chips. Let me take the heavier ones and you can take the lighter ones!"
dopamean: infuriated "How could you possibly know which bags are heavier? It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with 'in my experience' you attempt to make it sound like you're just talking about your personal experience but then you go on to say something that sounds objective and _could_ be measured but wasn't! Did you weigh each bag to determine their objective heft? No!"
dopamean's partner: distraught "I'm so sorry, dopamean! I will never again share informed personal experience with you about objective matters without first conducting a rigorous measurement program beforehand to confirm my priors. Thank you for showing me just how much better I can be! I can tell you're so much smarter than me and I can learn so much from you."
dopamean: angrier than anyone has ever been "Oh 'I'm so much smarter than you' am I? You fail yet again! Did you measure my IQ, did you measure yours?? Have you learned nothing!? I could easily be 3 or even 4 standard deviations below your IQ!"
It is limited to San Francisco, rather than the whole of California, but they do just drive around the city, especially after 9pm. As a rider, the future is here. Instead of just checking Uber and Lyft for prices to get somewhere, now I check the Cruise and Waymo app for prices too. (Well, not Cruise anymore.) But yes, it's a thing. I call a car, sometimes it doesn't have a driver, and it takes me to where I need to go in the city when I'm unable, or don't want to drive. Or more likely, don't want to deal with parking. I'll take the bus when I'm going that way but the bus doesn't always go in the right direction.
Can't wait for them to be able to take freeways over to Oakland and down to Cupertino.
Those sound like trips where you shouldn't call a car at all, but get on the local transit service. Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.
Self driving cars are useful to replace various maintenance or delivery trucks in cities, and farm transport. However mass transit is better for most things people are thinking about them for.
If the bus had dynamic routing, so it could show up where I am when I’m ready, and take me where I want to go, I’d be a huge fan. I don’t mean this ironically! I think dynamically dispatched, self-driving buses and vans will eventually save public transit. They’ll enable a much higher quality of service than current bus systems. Which drive around mostly-empty stopping every few blocks so it takes forever to get anywhere.
You don't want dynamic routing. You want frequent predictable routing.
Dynamic means you call and 1-15 minutes later a bus comes. Then it takes you to your destination, but you have no idea when you will get there because sometimes it takes long detours for someone else.
Frequent predictable routing means when you feel like leaving you just walk out the door confident that the bus will be there soon (even if you see it pulling away just as you arrive), and you quickly learn which buses to transfer to, to get where you want to be.
The problem is for the bus to stop near you, it has to stop often. To stop often, it has to move slowly, which means it will take forever to get to your destination. A separation of local and express busses you transfer between could possibly help. But if the theory is that you’re going to take a local, to get to an express, to get to a local near your destination, then you’ve wasted a ton of time on transfers. Good luck getting to your destination in less than an hour.
I’m a fan of public transit and have experienced many good public transit systems. The unfortunate truth is that in any neighborhood with less-than-extreme population density, you have to shape your life around the system by living and working near core transit lines to get reasonable travel times. That works great for people who can do that (I’ve done it myself!), but a better system could aim higher to serve the entire public. The American built environment simply can’t be adequately served by traditional bus networks.
> The problem is for the bus to stop near you, it has to stop often. To stop often, it has to move slowly, which means it will take forever to get to your destination.
Add bus lanes and smart traffic lights (giving busses permanent green waves), this stops being the case. Busses should never be stuck in traffic. That's bad for scheduling and makes them needlessly unattractive.
Living in city with frequent stops, the stops do not slow them down so much. IF you add "looking for a parking place" into estimation for a car, going by bus is frequently faster (which is why I frequently pick bus - it is more predictable and faster).
That seems like very 20th century thinking. We should be aspiring to shape public transport to the needs of the riders instead of making the riders learn fixed routes and transfers. Waymo is very likely to be superior to existing public transportation in all dimensions for almost every transit need. There might still be a role for big buses and trains in the peak of rush hour (if that still exists).
The needs of the rider are predictable. You cannot make shared vehicles both flexible and predictable. Fixed routes are predictable and thus easy to plan your life around. When fixed routes are also frequent there is no sacrifice in that.
I don’t think the needs of the riders are predictable. Large upfront costs and static design routes are a major risk (see the Detroit public transit that serves areas no longer of much interest and is often empty). That’s why many politicians favor buses as an example; they’re flexible enough to move with demand.
Public transportation depends on a critical mass of customers with significant overlap in their trips. If you deviate from fixed routes you start to describe a taxi service.
But the bus is already stopped, its in my garage waiting for me. And I don't need to figure out what bus lines I need to change to or understand their schedules, the route for this bus happens to be exactly where I want to go.
I'm generally pro-transit and continue to vote for it, but in many places and routes a car is often more convenient if one can afford it.
A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) is going to generally beat dispatched self driving cars in terms of convenience. 20 busses per hour is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city and doesn’t need any kind of routings because swapping lines has such a minimal wait time.
However, if you’ve only experienced terrible public transit then it seems like you need fundamental change rather than simply doing the same old things just better. Self driving seems like a solid fit for 2am, but driving empty vehicles only makes congestion worse.
A respectful culture is needed for public transit to properly function, and the Bay Area doesn’t have that.
Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.
And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.
So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.
Frequent, accessible public transit is the main point. Anything else is more of an excuse, honestly. Nothing puts people off more than the bus being 15 minutes late on a half-hourly schedule. 5, or even 10 minute frequencies are required to get the level of service you need for people to reliably use public transit in a "turn up and go" manner.
The more common public transit use by the general population the more you dilute the fringes of society with normal people. There’s vastly more normal people than people on the fringes of society but if it’s normal for people to drive then that’s what normal people will do. Lots of normal people also tends to enforce social conformity.
You see the same effect in any pace where the general public visits. Walmart at 6pm is a very different place than Walmart at 3AM not because the store is different but because you’re self selecting for people who don’t need to be asleep at 3AM.
Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris. So, yeah, okay that kind of behavior drives people to private vehicles… where the anti-social behavior involves shooting at each other or running people off the road.
A road rage incident where someone pulls out a gun is notable enough to get a newspaper article. Phone snatching, seeing people smoke meth on BART, encountering disgusting things, etc, etc are daily occurrences. This is not an apples to apples comparison.
I find your experience very different from mine. I live in Texas. I would expect a number of open carry handguns in any public place, and if someone started shouting half of those open carrying would put a hand in their gun and look tense.
OTOH, stealing a phone, smoking meth, or disgusting excretory things outside of a bathroom would be unthinkable. I would not worry if I left a cell phone on the seat if my pickup in Waxahachie or Hurst with the window down all day. I did leave my wife's cell phone in the seat of my pickup with the windows down when I ate in a restaurant in Waxahachie a day or two ago. She made fun of me for it, and I replied "It's Waxahachie."
BTW, the last car dealership I passed on the way home (before I stopped for dinner and answered this post) is called "Lifted Trucks." Seriously. You can look them up on Google Maps in Hurst, TX. LOL. This is Texas.
This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.
A small minority do crazy things anywhere. People exaggerate how often it happens.
Transit looks worse just because the people most likely to do that have 'mental issues' (possibly drug caused, but there are other causes) that also mean they can't keep a job and thus can't afford a car. However even then they are a small minority that you see because you are paying attention not because it is very common.
Yeah, well. It's not that you're exaggerating about how bad BART is (although there is that to some extent), it's that you're downplaying how much nonsense goes on with personal vehicles. Over the past couple decades I've commuted by car, Muni, and BART and while Bay Area transit isn't as bad as the suburbanites claim the drivers are among the worst I've experienced anywhere. At this point post-pandemic it's like a parody of Max Max.
> This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.
I mean, there's a whole stretch of Lake Merritt where people go park and hotbox their cars and the drive away every single day. That doesn't make the news even though the consequences of riding BART while high are much, much lower than the consequences of piloting a car while high. And I'm sure you've seen the videos of people driving up to do what the kids these days call 'bipping' (a.k.a. snatch and grab).
Making the news isn't really a good indicator of risk here.
> Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris.
When public transit advocates dismiss such inhuman conditions as a non-concern, I can only laugh. The average driver in America will never be shot at in any point in their entire life, but by your own admission inhumane filthy conditions are so common on city buses that you saw all of the above behaviors, excepting only the assault, during a short stay in Paris. I prefer the very infinitesimally small chance of getting into some sort of Mad Max scenario in my car to a 100% chance of encountering disgusting filth on a city bus. Most Americans agree with me. Most people who say they disagree actually have no choice and when they say they prefer the bus they're just coping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
If America had a civil and clean population like Japan, then the situation could be different. Clean city buses would be inoffensive, but that's not the reality we're dealing with. The deranged antisocial population of America is substantial. Maybe you'll say that we should fix that. You bet your ass we should. But until that happens, don't expect people to put up with city buses when they have any other choice. Just because you're okay with wallowing in filth doesn't mean the rest of us should be.
The fact that there are drug addicts and people with mental health problems is a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.
Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems. Fair play but I don't think any public money should ever go to solving problems in this way.
> a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.
Then people will continue to drive, no matter how much you whine about it. If you can't make city buses safe and clean, then people won't use them.
> Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems.
In fact, owning and using a car is an effective way to avoid the filthy of city buses. You seem to think this is a mistaken belief, but you're simply wrong. You will never persuade Americans to give up their cars and use buses instead unless you acknowledge the problem of filth and fix it. You can't gas light people into thinking the filth is fine or their cars aren't an option. Denying the problem and trying to shame people who acknowledge it will never get you to the state you want society to be in.
> A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) ... is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city
When living in London a few years ago (clearly a major city), the wait times between buses were pretty short. They might have been about 6-10 minutes for some of the more central areas (rough guess from memory).
I'd be surprised if they were "every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) though".
Meanwhile, in Melbourne and Sydney though (substantial cities, but not London sized) the buses are more like 1/2 hour apart.
In Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia) the buses are 1 hour apart, and seem to stop about 7pm each night.
I'm in London and every 4 minutes isn't far off. I live in suburbia like most people and can walk 10 minutes to a high street where there and multiple routes at 8 min frequency each way, which overlap for large parts of their route, therefore some journeys really do have a bus every 3 minutes. And if it's a journey from central London to central London then there's going to be 2+ routes that serve every journey.
Buses that look empty generally have 5 people on them, and so are still more efficient use of space. Either that or at the end of the route and will soon turn around and fill up again.
In San Francisco the current standard is 800–1,360 ft between bus stops depending on the grade. Street car stops are every 2–3 blocks. The MTA's spent years trying to cull stops because many are much closer than that, so no… walking to a Muni stop in San Francisco is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the city.
Edit: ca. 2008 the policy was 800–1,000 ft for bus stops and 1,000–1,200 ft for street car stops. On grades between 10–15% the standard is 500–600 ft for bus stops, and on grades above 15% the standard is 300–400 ft. Trunk routes have 24x7 service, and (I can't find it now) there are standards about the amount of service on the other routes but it's something along the lines of 80% of residences are supposed to have frequent service ~18 hours a day and reduced service in the wee hours. Currently the tightest headway I can find is 8 minutes for travel during peak hours along the busiest routes.
Muni is often inefficient but it can get you pretty much anywhere in the city (including places you can't walk to like Treasure Island) for most of the day.
Edit: For reference San Francisco is roughly 7 miles by 7 miles. So you're talking about transiting halfway across town.
Cars (with or without drivers) are competing for the same right of way as the bus, so more of them will simply slow everyone down. A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people? A self-driving car can fit, what, 5? The current quantity of Lyft/Uber/Waymo/Cruise vehicles already has a negative impact on traffic. Put enough self driving cars on the street to make up for the capacity that buses provide and you're going to make traffic much, much worse.
It's a capacity issue. You just can't transport as many people with cars.
In a completely empty city, the first car handily beats transit. Of course.
In a traffic-laden city, separated PT tends to determine how long it takes to travel instead. 12AM it takes me 25min to get into the centre of the city - at peak hour it's more than an hour. Curiously, the train also happens to take approximately an hour to get into the city.
If public transit exists, it becomes the upper-bound for traffic travel time as if it takes longer than that people start to take the constant-time PT trip instead of the variable car trip.
In a software sense you can usually view decent PT (ie. not busses stuck in traffic) as having a high but constant time cost, whereas cars have a low but increasing cost corresponding to the traffic load (with non-separated transit incurring the same costs but being worse due to traffic stops :()
Fair argument. Public transit caps downside case and upside case. Cars can have downside but have upside too.
I want to have my cake and eat it too and I think we can with driverless cars. Lots of software tricks we can do with a network of driverless EVs + city traffic lights to dramatically increase capacity.
My roadmap for SF would be:
- allow waymo and others to scale driverless cars
- stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)
- give the same per passenger subsidy to riders of driverless cars that current public transit passengers receive per trip
- require that driverless cars in SF should send realtime destination info to the traffic light network
- remove parking spots on high traffic streets effectively creating two more lanes
- allow bus lanes to be exclusively used by driverless cars
- tax driverless car rides based on occupancy+distance+time of day so you can traffic shape
> - stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)
As long as we're throwing out fantasies, I'd like us to spend $2B more, and have the Chinatown subway run all the way out to Fisherman's Wharf and the Marina district, and also expand capabilities west out to the avenues.
I'm amazed we got the Chinatown subway and I'm excited to see the city develop around it!
Wait really? Genuinely curious. Do you think $2B was worth it?
Like I just implicitly assumed that that is way too much money for the value it provides but admittedly I didn't think much about it. Can you quantify how the benefit might be worth that much?
I think Cruise Automation has roughly raised that amount over it's entire lifetime. Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.
Congratulations you just reinvented communism. We don’t want cities making those kinds of investments for hopefully obvious reasons in that context.
Subway lines can pay for themselves across hundreds of years. It’s the best kind of investment for cities because it operates on their timescales and use ultra cheap bonds responsibly and it doesn’t interfere with free markets.
People’s willingness to buy very low yield government bonds is independent from people willing to make high risk investments in private companies. Trying to get people in group A to make investments of type B through government action is the kind of central planning you don’t want.
Cities taking advantage of people with ultra low risk tolerance to make infrastructure investments at ultra low rates that only make sense with very long time horizons is dependent on markets.
> Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.
Ahh, so by ‘we’ you didn’t actually mean a group you are part of but instead other people.
Your premise is, to put it politely, completely wrong. Even considering how broad the scope was, Van Ness took well longer than it should've. The delays were almost entirely political, driven by one supervisor who was on a mission to preserve the street lights.
Meanwhile the solution you've put forth is almost entirely political and even were there general acceptance of privatizing the roads that sort of project would be mired in just as much NIMBYism. Even then you're talking about, what, refunding federal monies that have already been spent? Levying a new tax (which will require a 2/3 voter approval), subsidizing private corporations, and kneecapping transit? And for what? A system that has a fraction of the capacity of the existing bus and tram infrastructure?
Beyond the gall to suggest privatizing our roads, you're suggesting handing it all over to Google? Really? A corporation with a track record of zero customer or long-term product support is not in a position to run our roads.
Ok I agree I was being a little ambitious :) Let me tackle your points one at a time:
- cities already pay private companies to help manage the traffic infrastructure so it doesn't seem too crazy. Seems hyperbolic to claim that's "privatizing roads"
- subsidizing private corps - ok maybe we shouldn't do this. but we should stop subsidizing public transit. it should have to compete with private alternatives now that we have them. previously there were no alternatives to public transit so we kind of had to subsidize it for equity, but now I think private enterprise (given fair competition) could deliver the same outcome. Instead of subsidizing the method (public transit) we should subsidize the outcome we want (equitable access to transport - which might mean that you need to provide low income rides as a ride share provider)
- on the money spent on the SF subway and bus lane, you're right, we're not getting that back. But we can just stop doing those going forward.
- regarding van ness bus lane, I didn't know it was because of the street lamps. But that actually proves my point. Basically to make any improvement, we just have to steer clear of new physical infrastructure. I'm suggesting no new physical infra, just software.
- regarding the tax on driverless rides, we kind of already have it. SF has a 3.25% tax on all ride sharing rides. We'd just need to update that to price the tax dynamically to help traffic shape. And if we don't get that piece, it's not critical.
- on giving it to Google. Fine... not them then. Whoever can provide the best service for the lowest cost. Perfect for free markets. In fact, if we make the API to traffic system standardized, you could plugin and hot swap different providers. You could even back test new providers on historic data to see what their performance would have been like and swap to new providers as they demonstrate their improvement over the current system
- cars have a fraction of the capacity of buses - yeah only if they are fully utilized and you're not counting getting to and from the bus station nor the loss of productivity waiting for a bus
All of these are possible to implement in a really short amount of time (because its mostly software) compared to public transit (10+ years to make a bus lane on van ness)
NYC is the one US city where trains almost make sense, but there are a ton of downsides related to cost, safety, etc. I'd love to see all those dedicated right-of-ways put to more efficient use with self-driving vehicles.
Great for uber is still limited by traffic and is a lot more expensive than great transit which doesn't get stuck in traffic, and thus is much cheaper than uber for better service.
Any bus that has stops every 100-200 feet is unbearably slow. Even every 1/8 of a mile is too much to be an time efficient mode of transportation unless you have BRT imo.
I’ve said it several times but you average ~165 feet when walking to a stop every 1/8th of a mile. Max is 1/2 the distance because you can walk either direction and average is again 1/2 the max because you start at a random point not the worst possibility. 5280/8/2/2 = 165.
As to unbearably slow, there’s this idea of express busses and buss only lanes etc. The core of cities really isn’t that big, it takes forever because traffic is slow or mass transit is infrequent.
All these calculations are only true if your destination is on the road the bus runs along. Since not every road has a bus line, you also usually have to walk multiple blocks perpendicular _away_ from the bus line in addition to some of the distance between stops.
If your road doesn’t have a bus line then that’s a problem not an inherent limitation.
Ideally you want a grid where bus lines are near intersections so going from North to East means crossing 1 street so you can go anywhere with 2 waits and a street crossing.
Fair enough. Not familiar with SF bus system but the bus system where I live, which is considered quite good I think, has each bus line 1/2 mile apart from each other. Almost no one lives directly along a route so there's an extra 1/8 mile average walk just to get to the route, not a stop on it. Fine by me but a lot of people don't seem capable of that for whatever reason. Combine that with the bus not actually going to where you're trying to get and I can see why people aren't huge fans.
(On average), for a walk to the stop of 100-200 feet the bus would need to stop every 200-400 feet. 300 ft seems to be roughly 100m, which is probably much too short a distance still. 250m or ~800 ft aligns better to my experience with cities with good transit, and in the worst case scenario you have to walk 125m to your nearest stop.
1/8th of a mile is every 660 feet, but the farthest you can be from one is the midpoint so 330 feet. However for every trip starting at the midpoint there’s another at and the bus stop thus the average would be 1/2 that distance again or 165 feet.
Assuming a 1D world, you can beat this in practice.
Busses around me don't stop at every stop, only if there are people waiting at the stop or someone has requested a stop by pressing a strip along the windows or one of the almost dozen buttons on the bus.
show me an american city where a bus stops every 100-200 feet every 3 mins. Heck show me where it'd even be possible in an american city. That sounds like the most inefficient bus ever.
That’s a bus stop every ~1/8th of a mile not 200 feet.
You cut it in half because you can walk to the closest stop and cut it in half again before you’re starting at a random point not the worst possibility so 5280/8/2/2 = 165 feet. Except we don’t exit buildings or get on busses in the middle of the street so it’s not random.
I am not aware of a single city across the world that has such a thing, and yet public transit remains incredibly useful and functional in places not-the-US. An enormous part of Europe, for example, even in towns and cities with far less density than those here.
Can we pretty please stop acting like this is a complete enigma that nobody else has managed to figure out?
Hello from Oxford, UK, where we have the Pick Me Up[0] bus! Far more useful than standard buses, unless you live near a bus stop and need a hub and spoke journey into/out of the centre.
AVs should in principle liberate public transit from a lot of limitations. Surge capacity should be easier to deploy. Smaller busses on smaller routes should be at less of a cost disadvantage. Pick up and drop off could be more flexible.
I live in a semi-rural area that used to have a trolley line to the next town where one could catch a train into Boston. It's also a challenge to optimize school bus routes in a sparsely populated area, and AVs could help with that.
Oddly enough they got rid of both Uber Pool and Lyft Shared in most cities. Definitely Boston, but also half a dozen other cities I've visited. It may still exist somewhere.
I wish they hadn't, because my commuter card works with the shared rides. So even if a shared ride was the same price as a normal Uber/Lyft (or even more) I'd do it just to be able to use the commuter card.
It was supposed to be for covid I think, but worked after for a while too. The commuter card just verifies that the charge is billed as something under "transportation" (and probably that it's not airfare). It's the Lyft/Uber app that appears to stop you from using the commuter card for non-shared rides.
Honestly (and since this is a hacking forum) I have a theory that if you could hook the Lyft/Uber app with Frida or a modified kernel you could push through payment using a commuter card on regular Lyft/Uber rides.
Doesn't even need to be 5-10x the population density. The "inner ring" of Paris is similar density to San Francisco and supports a metro system that I think most would agree makes car trips unnecessary. But the "rebuild the city" part might still be somewhat necessary.
Living in a European city and relying 100% on public transit and walking, with occasional biking for longer distances, it’s easy. It does not require 5-10x the population density, maybe just 2-3x, at least compared to San Francisco (which is already somewhat dense in parts). It is not a major shift in lifestyle easier. The tallest buildings in some cities in the Netherlands are 2-3 stories, and those cities still have regular buses, trams, and trains.
There are even some suburbs full of single family homes, with yards, which still have buses every 8 minutes all day long, and long-distance commuter train service every 20 minutes.
Yes the US needs more density for this to be feasible. But San Francisco isn’t that far off on the density that it would needs
This is easier said than done. Making the density 2-3x is still a huge undertaking. With suburbs with single-family homes, this means bulldozing half of it and somehow redrawing all the property lines so the lots are 1/2 - 1/3 as large and building new houses within the new lots. You can't just magically take a subdivision full of McMansions and somehow increase density 2-3x, unless all those houses take in boarders.
Also, SF is still pretty unique compared to most American cities. So you might be able to do this stuff in SF, but not so much in places like Houston.
> Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.
Lots of people have been trying to get decent public transit in US cities for decades. There is so much resistance it often seems impossible.
So, yes, obviously public transit would be great. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's just not an option for most people. "Talk to your local politicians about fixing service" sounds delusional to be honest.
A small minority has been trying. A larger number of people (but still a minority) get interested in it, but they don't care about fixing transit. They just care about shoveling money to someone else (unions, contractors, artists...) and transit is one way to do that.
I agree with you in the abstract. The reality of the US political and administrative system is that it’s not possible to build new public transit, but it is possible to develop self-driving cars.
> Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.
Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?
I'll take the bus when the bus route is convenient, which is usually, and I'll take Uber/Cruise/Lyft when I'm in a hurry and it's not. I prefer public transportation but I'm more practical about it. Which includes electric scooters (Spin/Lime), or vespa scooters (Revel).
I think if you were building a city from scratch, it's arguable that self driving individual pods is the way to go for the most convenient AND most efficient door to door transport. Maybe you disagree, but its not important because we're not building cities from scratch.
For existing city infra and politics that we have, I think self driving is def the best way to go. Suggesting that an individual should lobby their gov't to fix public transit seems like lower probability of success than voting with their wallet for longer self driving trips.
Public transit isn't one of those things that can be incrementally fixed. Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better, that's why its so appealing imo.
I mean maybe if you're a small town and want to stay a small town. Large cities, should definitely drive most transportation away from personal vehicles/pods. Its simply a space/first principles issue [1]. The math seems 100x less scalable, simply because you hate being around other humans (in which case what are you doing in a big city anyway).
I always see that image referenced and it's kind of BS. it assumes the buses are filled to the brim constantly but the cars only ever have 1 person it. It also doesn't take into account the transport to and from your door on both ends. It also doesn't consider the inefficiency in wait time.
The ideal transport would be a cocoon just big enough for you to fit in that picks you up at your door and gets you to your exact destination with minimal energy overhead. I'd argue a self driving car is much closer to that ideal and we can iterate our way much easier to it than public transit.
"It also doesn't take into account the transport to and from your door on both ends."
This type of design is terrible for average health outcomes [1]. We should not be optimizing for this. Walking to the bus stop is a good outcome. We should optimize for better more frequent bus routes, but "door-to-door" is unnecessary and counter-effectual.
The rest (iteration speed, filling a bus to the brim etc.) are just political problems just as intangible as "lets build better roads (public infrastructure) for autonomous cars", so we can put that aside.
we don't have to couple exercise with transport. We don't say planes are bad because it reduces the number of cross country hiking trips people take.
On filling a bus, I think its a fundamental shortcoming of having fixed routes that they'll never be as efficient as point to point transport, especially electrified transport. i'm not really making a political argument.
I agree with the second point but given as 80% of city transports post-covid is back to being fixed commutes along fixed routes, I'm happy optimizing that along transit ways. I don't really care what happens with the remaining 20%.
Right now, nearly 100% of travel is with "personal cocoons", totally unnecessary (other than for political reasons) and creating immense downward pressure on health and social outcomes. In terms of levers the government has on health and social outcomes, transitway design is a big one, and it should use it.
The fact that its done badly in America is a political problem, and if you have any political power it should be expended fixing that, not rolling back public transit.
I think if these cocoons costed $2.50 a trip you might think differently. I think driverless cars + some iteration on the vehicles themselves gets us there (without subsidies!).
People love the equity argument for public transit. Non personally owned, ubiquitous, driverless, cheap, efficient and most importantly convenient cocoons would increase equity a whole hell of a lot more than the traditional definition of public transit imo
What is this solution we already have that you speak of? It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles in SF using public transit, between two popular destination pairs.
Fleets of driverless cars lets you do traffic shaping in time and space. Plus the marginal energy cost is basically nothing. It's basically all fixed cost BUT it's not like a transit project in the sense that you don't have to allocate a bunch of capital ahead of time and wait 10 years and then maybe get what you wanted (or not). Driverless cars are helpful the moment the first $200K car hits the road.
It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles using a car too at most peak times. It’s obviously not fair to compare a perfect autonomous transportation method with the current imperfect state of public transit.
As the population grows the driving times will get worse much faster than in transit because again, spatially, it just doesn’t scale well.
If you take 20-30% of everyone on a BART train and put em in autonomous cars with human drivers in the mix (like in the marginal $200K case tomorrow), what you have is abject chaos on the streets.
Every negative you mention about public transit is a political problem (ex: other first world countries can deliver public transit project in a matter of a 1-2 years and at a fraction of the cost).
no. i literally compared a common route on google maps for bus vs car, no transfers on the bus. car was 20 mins, bus was 40 mins when you factor in walking to the stop and waiting and walknig to your destination. to be fair, didn't consider time to get parking but its still less than 20 mins.
population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? we have very slow population growth and we can scale our way out of it with existing infra. more driverless cars = less parking = two more lanes on most streets. that can double throughput.
yes public transit is a huge political problem - so whats your solution? because the tech for public transit has existed forever so why isnt it better in the US? You cant just blame politics and then do nothing. You also cant say "we just need to advocate!" because, well, if it were that easy it would have already happened. Driverless cars are a good solution precisely because it uses existing infra and I think the political hurdle can be much much lower.
"population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? "
well then you can definitely put away your dreams of a magical $2.50 pod travel. You need people, more people, young people to build all that. And if we're saying flat and low population growth that dream is over, all conversation can stop.
But if we can turn things around on population, public transit is the only way things scale. Personal travel pods/cars are a current stopgap that only kind of works for our current population levels. Please re-measure car travel times at 5:30pm on a Wednesday evening when 80% of all trips happen, like I've mentioned, the remaining 20% are highly inconsequential to overall transportation design.
The ideal transport is be a bicycle, or an e-bike for cities with hills. The problem is that bike lanes are still not great. I bike commuted in SF for years. Bikes are ideal "last mile" transport too, for long commutes trains with bike carriages can be added in. Numerous cities in Europe show this works very well.
Having said that, it's an ideal which I fear is probably far from reachable for most people given the way cities have been built, and infrastructure priorities in the US do not favour bikes.
I love biking and am excited by the possibility of the roads having more attentive and courteous Waymo cars and fewer speeding and drunk human drivers. (A man on bike was killed by a drunk speeding driver 24 hours ago 300 feet from my home.)
the bus doesn't have to be full to be a more efficient use of space than cars though. A typical (non-articulated) bus is the length two-three cars at most.
It is worth noting that personal vehicles are getting larger, so the amount of ridership required for a bus system to be more efficient than cars is only going down for the foreseeable future, even before getting into second order effects.
turns out that compared to lugging a living room around for every (average car occupancy of) 1.5 people on the road, a bus system has an extremely low efficiency bar to cross.
I don't see anything in that article that actually states efficient transport. It's just a long winded way of saying that there are a lot of factors in network design. kind of a useless article imo
> Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better
Except for energy consumption. If we were in a world were fossil fuels were unlimited and climate change was not a thing, maybe I would agree with you.
But we are not. We need to get much more efficient with energy, and cars just can't do enough. Better accept it earlier than later and start building public transports wherever it's possible.
Trains near me are very polluting per passenger mile. The trains are empty most of the day and spew out visible clouds of diesel smoke. That doesn't even account for all the huge energy cost of building dedicated railways and hundreds of bridges and crossing signals.
I would suggest comparing electric trains to electric cars. And the solution to your problems sounds like they should improve the trains, not get everyone a car :-).
Right. From my point of view, you answered to my comment about energy by saying "it's negligible", but you apparently meant "it's negligible in a metric different than the one of the post I am answering to, but I won't mention it". I think that's why I got confused :-).
That's an interesting claim, but have you got numbers to back it up, compared to bus networks which are also largely electric/hydrogen in most recent deployments?
Google says it costs roughly 4 cents a mile to charge a tesla model 3. Most city rides are a couple of miles so its a really really small fraction of the cost of trip cost (even if you price at public transit prices)
Can we talk about energy, and not price? And compare the consumption of a Tesla Model 3 with the average number of passengers (< 1.5?) versus the consumption of electric public transit?
Why? You can convert energy to cost and back - its all the same energy source for EVs vs public transit. Ultimately cost is what matters anyways.
Who cares if the energy requirement of public transit vs an EV has a huge delta (spoiler: there isn't a huge delta in terms of energy per passenger mile). They are both super low and efficient.
To you, now. But the biggest problem of humankind right now is energy. Consequences of our use of energy are climate change and biodiversity loss. But even ignoring those consequences, we are going into a world where we will have dramatically less energy. Not in 100 years, in the next few decades. So you will live in that world.
That sounds like hell. More areas should be walkable and bikeable. Motorized vehicles should be limited to minimal areas so that the rest is quiet, safe and accessible. European cities have it right here - underground transport and quiet walkable surface level.
Regular cars aren't scalable at all. AVs are not any different than regular cars. In fact AV will increase the amount of cars on the road as more people that can currently not drive, such as children and the elderly, are now more likely to use a relatively low occupancy AV. So we can expect transit to get worse as AVs become prevalent.
The only scenario where AV may scale better than cars is if we're talking about autonomous buses, and that will only perform better if they are given the other features of public transit, such as dedicated lanes, which require set routes, and we're pretty much just talking about public transit in general at this point.
This picture makes it clear, for the most part. Public transit is a pareto improvement on personal driving pods in terms of scalability. Especially for fixed commute routes.
I'm in FiDi right now (weekday afternoon). A Waymo ride to Dolores Park is $18. UberX is $17. Lyft is $19.85.
I find that late night you often will not be able to get an Uber. I think drivers have been ceding ground to Waymo's obvious night driving superiority.
My experience has been that they are roughly equivalent in most cases. Sometimes they're slightly cheaper, multi-stop routes they tend to be a lot cheaper.
If you tip in Uber/Lyft, Waymo is always more price competitive.
I expect to see one every few minutes in San Francisco. When I counted in August, 4 of 100 vehicles going past my house were self-driving (https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/16873429948135628... ). I don't recall the exact time period, but believe it was just under half an hour.
SF today is as close to Blade Runner that we'll ever get. Every billboard is for some AI company, you ride in a driverless cab across a literal mile of homeless people drugged out of their minds, screaming and pooping on the sidewalk. SF today is so aggressively dystopian that it's sort of hard not to enjoy the experience.
I think this comment is slightly exaggerated. I didn’t see that many ads for AI companies and while I did see some driverless vehicles, they were in the minority and I only saw them on my second full day exploring the city.
There are a large number of homeless people openly doing drugs, and there is some poop, but I find these descriptions to be generally inaccurate.
Don’t get me wrong, the situation is bad, but based on descriptions like this I was expecting far far worse.
Nearly every billboard I've in SF, when I used to live near there 1-7 years ago, was tech. So not AI, but maybe "one app to rule them all" (I forget whose slogan that was).
https://www.youtube.com/@JJRicks has almost 200 videos of his Waymo rides at this point, and has probably captured everything one could hope to see them do.
It is probably an odd thing to find because in SF they really are everywhere. I don't live in SF but visit a few times a year and after the first time I saw one they just sort of became part of the cityscape and not worth filming.
In LA they're currently pretty active in the Santa Monica/Venice area (although rare enough that they get a lot of stares and photos... i felt like a celebrityon my rides). If you want to try it out there's some upcoming events where they'll give out a code for 1 week of free rides
We're an active market in Phoenix for Waymo, and I live in Central Phoenix and see Waymos every single trip I take now; they're nearly ubiquitous. But I've also taken them several times. They're safe, very capable drivers, and I have a lot of confidence in them, to be honest.
They aren’t littered through CA, in CA they are exclusively in SF. In SF they are common and as they seem to drive nonstop, take more road time than a comparable number of normal cars.
They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.
I really hope if anything that seeing so many occupant-less vehicles on the streets makes us collectively realize how inefficiently these vehicles are using a scarce, congestion-prone resource in a way that wasn’t as visible with Uber/Lyft.
I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.
The city should just start to bill big fleet operators for passenger-less miles.
That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer.
By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.
Kinda surprised they stop... When you have a self-driving system that costs $200k+, you want to keep it running and collecting data as much as possible - passenger or no passenger.
The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.
But when roaming around at like 10 mph average round the city, it can presumably do a full 18+ hour day on a single charge. Electric cars are super efficient in urban environments.
In the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area I see Waymo, Nuro, and unmarked-but-we-all-know-it's-Apple autonomous vehicles quite frequently. A few times a week at least.
Cruise specifically operated in SF where I agree they have been a very common sight.
That was always the selling point about autonomous cars, i.e. that they could be driven 24/7, almost.
There was no selling point related to the environment backw when the hype about self-driving cars really got going, I'd say 2016-2018-ish, you weren't getting people talking about taking the tram instead of getting driven around by these things.
I was pretty sure 'plurality' was a word made extinct from the english language 50+ years ago, with the exception of patent documents, where its use appears to be compulsory.
I only drive to the city about once a week and I typically see 0.5 AVs per trip.
On the most recent drive, I was in the right lane on the freeway and an AV was merging from the on ramp. It was driving extremely slowly and did not react to me (IIUC I have "right of way" and it should either speed up or slow down) so I basically had to change lanes to avoid it merging into me.
Weekly? Now, this is nowhere near SF levels, but I live in South Austin, and I probably see at least 1-2 autonomous cars every single day I go driving in town.
> They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far below the level of most Human drives.
Are they performing worse, or are they just making a better risk tradeoff? Human drivers kill a lot of people every week.
I frequently walk my dog where a lot of cruises operate. I dislike there's no.. two-way communication? with car. I mean that with a human driver if we make eye contact then I know they see me and I can safely (yes yes not 100%) cross the street. With a cruise I have no idea if it sees me, or if there's a bug that will make it drive as I'm in the middle of the crosswalk. They actually make me jog across out of fear.
I've seen multiple cruises strand just walking around the city. I've never seen a waymo strand. Anecdotally I've heard the ride quality of cruise is a lot worse.
I live in the Bay Area and I largely agree with this, but I should also add that the design of most San Francisco streets is stupid, turn-only lanes sneak up on you without advance notice, there are too many individual garages and too few parking structures, there are homeless encampments everywhere, there is always the crazy-new-scooter-contraption-of-the-week being ridden everywhere, there are too many construction projects being taken up at once that never finish, instead of concentrating the entire Bay Area's construction forces to do 1 project start-to-finish in 1 day.
Cruise cars do not perform acceptably in SF but they probably would if they deployed in the bazillion mid-sized cities out there with wide streets and ample shoulder space.
They're deployed in Austin and there have been a lot of complaints there too, although no serious injury accidents as far as I know.
Wide fast streets come with their own set of problems. For instance, stopping in the middle of an intersection is much riskier, the car needs to see objects farther away, etc.
one-third of all road vehicle deaths resulted from speeding [2].
> traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd
Because that is how most people in SF pedestrians are killed: in an unobstructed left against traffic. More than 300 people are injured by left-turning drivers every year in San Francisco. In 2019, 40% of traffic deaths occurred when drivers making left turns hit pedestrians – mostly people using crosswalks who weren’t seen by drivers until it was too late [1]
> far below the level of most Human drives
While the median driver might not be that bad, the average driver sure kills a lot of people. The average person crashes their car 3-4 times over a lifetime
> Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down.
In that sense, I agree that we should aspire for better self-driving cars in general. Technology allows us to have some of our cake and eat it too.
I'd take this further. Given that self-driving cars not a fashion/emotional purchase, we should similarly tech-them-out to improve collision outcomes. Make the car collide with a pedestrian at their feet rather than the torso. Make it impossible for someone to go 'under' the car. promote outside-airbag design to minimize collision impact.
For starters, I support mandating driverless cars for all people with DUIs (at any phase in life), the elderly and those who have been in serious at-fault-accidents. Yes, self-driving cars are worse than the average human driver. But these people are clearly in the bottom 10 percentile.
Yes, the annoying things Cruise do are intended to prevent Unsafe things. But remember the context here: the DMV just yanked the permit because they don't believe these cars are safe. In their eyes, the new dangers introduced outweigh the things cruise might do better.
And as we agree; there are clearly better technologies ( waymo) out there that let us have it both ways.
> I support mandating driverless cars for all people with DUIs (at any phase in life), the elderly and those who have been in serious at-fault-accidents.
I think this is really jumping the gun given how limited current self driving tech is. The amount of people who do 100% of their driving in the few cities where Waymo operates is a tiny part of the population. Until commercial self driving cars can function in the remaining 99% of the country this is a non-starter. Maybe in 10 years this will be possible, although there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.
This looks like the moment of truth for Waymo. Waymo had self-driving for years but rolled out slowly as they prioritized safety. Competitors seemingly had caught up pretty quickly, the space got crowded and for a long time people were thinking Waymo moved too slowly.
But now it seems their strategy is paying off, at least in terms of developing an acceptable solution. It still remains whether they can monetize it well, but other people will have to more or less adopt Waymo's model or they won't have a business.
Knowing about software, if the key differential factor is how well you can handle a long tail of edge cases, it'll take years before others can compete with today's Waymo in fully autonomous self-driving cars. If you don't have an architecture and culture to obsess about edge cases, it could even be easier to tear down the software and rebuild.
I second the absurd conservative driving of Cruise. At the peak hour, even going straight, the Cruise car would suddenly slow down in the middle of the intersection because it seemed it just discovered the pedestrian cross walk and got scared.
average miles per year for male drivers in the US is 16,550. So 10-20k is smack in the middle average. not a LOT. ok, maybe it's objectively "a lot", but you are no more qualified than the average driver to assess.
maybe it's more compelling to say: as an average driver, EVEN I can see that Cruise is far less competent than Waymo.
I didn't realize the average was so high, but looked it up and confirmed.
Still feels like "a LOT" when I finally get home, and I also don't know anyone personally who drives nearly this much. Probably biased by my living in the city.
> ...San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year...
I spent a year in the bay area, working in the city for about half of it. It completely destroyed any joy I got from driving. I've been back in Ohio for 10+ years now, and I still hate driving.
It was that bad then, and I hear it's only gotten worse.
I'm fortunate in that I can usually avoid rush hour(s) and have a fairly normal experience. Most of the milage is out on the big highways, away from Bay traffic. Within the city it's fine, as far as city driving goes. Modern vehicles with driver assistance help.
When I do have to get from SF to Santa Clara for a 9 AM meeting... the joy indeed slides away.
Cruise and Waymo are the only two fully automated services I encounter. There might be others in other cities, but I can't comment.
I have all sorts of thoughts on the quality of driver assist from various manufacturers, but that's out of scope here and better material if I ever do Youtube.
Mercedes is fully autonomous below 40MPH, which is most city driving. Including, they accept insurance liability for any accident -- since human isn't involved and isn't required to be alert/attentive/intercede/etc.
While I don't disagree, this is also a city that has whole lanes on major streets reserved for cable cars. The city isn't exactly known for making decisions that drive efficiency.
Can you gather some information that backs up your claims here? How would devoting an extra lane to cars increase efficiency? I can't see a scenario where this would do anything but the opposite effect.
Simple math? Assuming a fixed number of cars on the road, more lanes will increase the flow. The cable cars are novelty transportation for tourists that residents of the city don't actually use for commuting.
In case it's not clear, I'm refering to California st starting downtown and going all the way up the hill.
No problem, so what is your argument for utilizing a whole lane for a mode of transportation that consumes a significant public resource without providing much benefit?
Car lanes in the city consume a significant public resource (space) and encourage negative externalities (noise, heat, air pollution, etc.).
They should absolutely be replaced with more space efficient options: tram tracks & bike lanes.
Not sure the point here. California St is a major artery in and out of downtown. All I'm saying is there is an opportunity for improving the quality of traffic but instead the public resource of an entire lane is wasted on a bespoke piece of transportation history that runs at a loss in excess of $40m/year
> They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit
[...]
They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways.
You've just described the average Subaru driver in the Seattle area. How is this notably different? Should they be banned from the roads as well?
The incident last month where that woman got dragged and pinned by the Cruise vehicle was pretty disconcerting. The initial collision wasn't the fault of the cruise vehicle (another vehicle hit her pushing her into the cruise vehicle and fled the scene), but the cruise vehicle then proceeded to try to "pull over" and just dragged this woman and rolled over her leg. Weird situation but definitely something made much much worse by not having a person in the loop once the incident occurred.
Aside from the other comments, pulling over when you detect a collision is definitely not best human practice on an ordinary city street for a human driver. If you detect a collision, you stop the vehicle, access the situation and maybe pull over based on your assessment of the situation.
And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop, this post-collision routine? Afaik, the overall program/system guiding a self-driving is some combination of trained neural-network routines and more standard robotic feedback loops. But "what to do after a collision" seems like one of those corner cases that neither programming approach would or could deal with so what development created this routine? It would have to be pure ad-hoc-ery and that suggests that in Cruise's approach to the last-mile/endless-corner-cases problem of self-driving cars is just that, a series of ad-hoc fixed. And this approach can neither be safe nor can it scale.
And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations. Why didn't the "you've just had a collision" signal not pull a human? (maybe it did and not saying that is their problem but otherwise..) The main explanation I can think of is ... the car's routines are already calling pilots a lot and the team is working feverishly to reduce this. An ad-hoc pull-over routine is intended to reduce those calls back to the pilots. Admittedly this is speculation but if true it reinforces my conclusion above.
> And further, I have to presume Cruise and the others have a bay of human pilots that are called-on to deal with difficult situations.
And then there's a momentary thought of this, and then I think how bad/hard it would be. Sitting there in a "call center", "Ding!" and you're suddenly thrown in to a car mid-collision, needing to take instant surveying of the situation (like "there's someone partly trapped under the vehicle", "am I in the middle of an intersection/interstate", etc., et al.
Even getting past that I think such a job would play absolute hell on epi, norepi, dopamine, etc., response and those people would burn out, quickly (and I say that as someone who spends a lot of time waking up to alarm tones going off before jumping in an ambulance or fire engine...).
I heard that the way Waymo works is that the car actually presents solutions, multiple-choice style, to the call center operator. The operator assesses the situation and chooses one, and then the car executes it. I assume there’s also a “none of the above”’or some such which would flag someone to come on site.
The remote operator cannot manually operate the car under these circumstances and that is by design.
By the time you're paged to handle the situation, the pedestrian is already trapped under the vehicle and you cannot see her because the car does not have an under-the-vehicle camera. So the only way you can handle this case is to rewind and review what happened before the collision and respond only then. Considering that the speed with which you react can be a matter of life and death, I don't see a satisfactory solution to this problem.
> And this brings a question to me: How did they create, develop, this post-collision routine?
I’m just going to assume it’s a liability thing:
* Cruise gets in an accident and stays in the road, passenger gets out and gets hit.
* Cruise gets in an accident and pulls to the curb, passenger can get out on the curb (and if they don’t, and get hit, Cruise can claim it pulled over).
I could see this decision being made (or reviewed by) legal. Which sounds like a truly awful way to build a product.
I agree with you on the adhockery as well. Sounds like it.
This woman got dragged 20 feet and then the car rolled over her leg and stopped. The fire department had to come and remove the wheel of the car to get it off her leg. I don't know of a single person who would have done that.
Dragged 20 feet after she was pinned under the car, or after being hit by the (human) driver? This part is not clear to me, and DMV never makes it clear either.
That's if they even saw the person was under them. My aunt got dragged by my grandfather as a child for a block and he at one point ran over my grandmother in a parking lot when she fell behind the car... this may say more about my grandfather than anything else, but average encompasses all kinds of drivers.
stop and get out of the car because someone just got flung onto/underneath your car? or perhaps have enough situational awareness to see that someone is about to walk into oncoming traffic?
I'm not too familiar with the details here, but probably hit the brakes and stop ASAP? If there could be someone under my car I wouldn't keep driving to "pull over safely".
Did Cruise release the video, its not clear to me a human driver would be better (other than some textual descriptions of the event)? The (human) person who actually caused the crash is still at large, and the bay area (SF + Oakland) still continues to one of the municipalities with negligble traffic enforcement [1] and massively dangerous (human) driving behavior [2].
So the city and DMV focussing their efforts on this corner case driving systems seems like dereliction of duty on the City attorney's and DoT's part.
This woman got dragged 20 feet by the car after the collision, and then the car rolled over her leg and left her pinned to the ground until the fire department came and removed the wheel to get her out. The cruise vehicle wasn't at fault for the initial accident, but the subsequent damage it caused was entirely the fault of the autonomous vehicle. A person would have stopped and helped the pedestrian.
The person who hit and run the woman in the first place shows this is obviously not true. You think they didn't notice?There was a muni bus who hit a pedestrian a few weeks ago and didn't even notice.
The person who hit and run commuted a felony. Cruise not providing evidence as asked and required by their testing agreement did similar. A muni bus and a car are different.
I agree that hiding data is bad and the company should be punished. I was simply commenting on the fact that people frequently do not stop when running over pedestrians, which the parent comment claimed.
Except it didn't immediately do that. Cruise released a report today saying that the car actually drove 20 feet and dragged the woman. There is no simple answer as to what to do. It's simply difficult and acting like there are easy answers to this is unproductive and imo not in the spirit of hackernews.
It's difficult to program an autonomous vehicle to handle this correctly, sure. That doesn't mean an average human driver wouldn't have done better. Of course a human driver wouldn't just keep driving to pull over after hitting a pedestrian and not being able to see where they went.
With respect this part is not clear. Only that the woman moved 20feet.
The DMV has not made clear whether she moved 20feet from the location of original Collision (ie with the human driver) or she was dragged 20feet as the cruise car kept driving. They’ve let the audience fill in the blanks and we’ve collectively come to the more exciting conclusion.
I'm pretty sure Cruise's statement worded this intentionally vaguely, and it's natural to assume they are trying to gloss over their responsibility in the most horrific part of the story.
It’s so painfully obvious to me that the solution here is to not having flying humans because of bad drivers that hit and run and not “actually let’s ban autonomous driving” (the city will inevitably come after Waymo next)
It's also worthwhile to point out that, although in this case the bad human driver was the immediate cause of the accident, at scale this will happen with some frequency, either from bad human drivers, bugs in the software or hardware, or just weird situations. The entire point of AVs is that these can also be corrected at scale: people who make excuses for the failure are removing the paramount incentive to make AVs as near to perfect as possible.
The first problem is much harder to solve, the second one only happens because of the first.
The city elected to do the easy useless thing first and is patting themselves in the back (people are still gonna be flying due to shitty human drivers tomorrow). This is a problem.
Seriously! This! This times a thousand! I get that technology is cool and we love seeing stuff like autonomous cars (and to be clear, where I live, I would say they should be the default because holy shit can people not drive here) but like, this is just not okay. Cruise's cars have a well documented history of disrupting traffic, and additionally, they have been found to:
- Not be forthcoming with authorities on releasing information/video
- Be misrepresenting the performance of their vehicles to the authorities
This is just not acceptable for a company to be doing. This is not how we disrupt industries. You cannot "fake it till you make it" with road safety when building vehicles that traverse roads safely is your business' entire raison d'etre! That's just unacceptable, full stop.
And, add to it, Cruise has been given a direct and clear path to resuming operations, which essentially boils down to doing the thing they should've been doing already. Like come on! How much more benevolent can we ask a regulator to be in this scenario? One could argue, frankly, that they're being too kid gloves about a company lying to an organization who's primary goal is ensuring safety about safety!
One problem is that the state taught them that it’s ok to lie, or at least that it’s ok to omit the full details.
During the certification process for these self-driving cars, incidents of the cars “misbehaving” (for lack of a better term) were supposed to be reported. However, if a human driver intervened, then it didn’t count as the car itself making a poor choice.
Example: self-driving car approaches an intersection clipping a reasonable speed and the light turns yellow. While a human driver would understand that it’s better to go through than to slam their brakes, the self-driving cat goes “yellow means red soon, stop now”. The human driver overrides and floors it through the intersection. Had the car stopped, that would’ve been a mark against the autonomous system. But since a human intervened, it doesn’t “count”.
This is a good watch on the state of self-driving cars and how policy makers have largely just said “eh, fuck it” in places like SF. https://youtu.be/pmGOjHi-7MM
Pretty sure a human driver would have done more than what Cruise did, which was...nothing. They didn't even respond to anyone until firefighters covered the vehicle's sensors.
> Firefighters obstructed the sensors of the driverless car to alert the Cruise control center. He said representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters and “immediately disabled the car remotely.”
But not Waymo. Which confirms all my personal biases.
More seriously, the statement cites four specific clauses that caused the permit to be suspended. The second one seems really interesting as it implies that there was a lie of omission where the others are more or less what I’d expect regarding safety risks:
> Today’s suspensions are based on the following:
> 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation.
> 13 CCR §228.20 (b) (3) – The manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles.
> 13 CCR §227.42 (b) (5) – Any act or omission of the manufacturer or one of its agents, employees, contractors, or designees which the department finds makes the conduct of autonomous vehicle testing on public roads by the manufacturer an unreasonable risk to the public.
> 13 CCR §227.42 (c) – The department shall immediately suspend or revoke the Manufacturer’s Testing Permit or a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit – Driverless Vehicles if a manufacturer is engaging in a practice in such a manner that immediate suspension is required for the safety of persons on a public road.
> "The AV braked aggressively before impact and because it detected a collision, it attempted to pull over to avoid further safety issues," Cruise added. "When the AV tried to pull over, it continued before coming to a final stop, pulling the pedestrian forward. Our thoughts continue to be with the victim as we hope for a rapid and complete recovery."
This looks like Cruise's fault, dragging a pedestrian while pulling over for "safety"?
It's not clear to me that this is purely a software problem; it might be a "the car doesn't even have the sensors necessary to detect this kind of situation" problem.
It could also be a "the software can't anticipate that this would be happening the way a human can because it doesn't have object permanence" problem. That's probably at least part of how a human would do it. But I have a suspicion that we're very, very far away from being able to get computers to do that in any sort of reliable way. So I'm guessing we're probably looking at specialized sensors if we want to handle this kind of situation appropriately.
Basically some sort of self-driving car equivalent of a human driver getting out of the car to check and make sure everything's OK.
I would be surprised if it turns out that those self-driving cars don't have object permanence. Making things move around without a physical model looks like a really nasty infinite bug-breeder.
For the longest time, at least the visual representation of trains at a level crossing strongly implied challenges around object permanence for Tesla.
I will say that I recognize that the visual representation may not be a 1:1 (in fact quite certainly isn't) mapping of the computer's "world view".
But it was quite ridiculous and definitely disconcerting seeing a level crossing with a train going through it and seeing the Tesla I was in acting like there was a traffic light that was erratically going red, while dozens of semi trucks flickered in and out of existence across the screen in front of me.
> strongly implied challenges around object permanence for Tesla
Anyone who has ever ridden in a Tesla knows they have no real perception of the world around them. Even just driving down the road they show icons of the things around them, which will randomly appear and disappear or change from busses to pedestrians to cars.
And yet a common thread in post-mortems on so many self-driving car collisions boils down to, "the car doesn't have object permanence."
It may have some ability to track specific things in specific ways in a manner that's hard-coded by engineers. But if that's the same thing as an actual mental model of the world then that implies that we've had a significant piece of AGI in the form of many video games for about half a century now and just not known it.
yeah, another poster mentioned they would have heard the screaming.
audio is difficult because a human can differentiate a woman screaming from the sounds of construction, etc. And also can tell that it's someone in shock vs someone in pain.
I'm unsure if audio processing is good enough for that yet, but imagine if someone were to try and you could get these vehicles to stop by screaming near them.
That is the beauty of technology: once we identify a problem we can do something about it and apply the fix to everything. While this is the type of case you can argue nobody would have expected before, once it happens you know and can setup lab situations where similar things happen and then figure out how best to respond over months of effort.
This is absolutely not a case nobody would have expected before? People end up under cars in accidents regularly. Imo any company that "found out" about this scenario through the cruise incident is guilty of gross negligence.
I'm sure all the bigger ones had looked at the possibility before, but it's only natural to revisit it when something horrible like this happens to a competitor.
I am sure that you don't generally start with this scenario - but I have to say again that this is a common thing. People end up under cars all the time (in accidents). There is just no way anyone should excuse any company for "not considering" this scenario if their cars are on roads. I'm sure it's hard! Other industries recognize corner cases where they need to design to avoid really ugly long tail outcomes and do so with ethical rigor. Most planes do not crash into the ocean and yet you are educated on how to escape in a water landing at the start of every flight.
Note that it's not just a pedestrian ending up under a car, but the whole situation of "other car knocks pedestrian into your path, which then ends up under your car".
The problem is that the world is full of near infinite permutations of situations that will continue to prove difficult for these technologies. A group of pigeons, to most human drivers, is identifiable from any approachable angle, in various weather and lighting conditions. To a computer, it has to be trained on all of that and consider the countless permutations - is that two pigeons in the rain in the dark? Is it 50 in broad daylight? Is it 12 cardboard cutouts? Our brains are incredibly good at parsing the world around us, and I’m not sure we’re even remotely close to that level of accuracy with self-driving cars, and that should worry people in cities where these are being rolled out.
Or you can not code your autonomous vehicle to try to move after getting into a collision, because if someone is caught under the car, you shouldn't try to move the car anyway.
It's hilarious that the fucking things park themselves if you put a traffic cone on the hood, but if they get into a crash, especially one with a pedestrian? BEEP BOOP MUST MOVE!
That's not hard for me to imagine. Now that I think about it, it should probably be standard for autonomous cars -- if there's an accident or something unexpected it should pull over, unless it can't reach the side of the road without hitting something or someone is trapped under the car.
> it should pull over, unless it can't reach the side of the road without hitting something or someone is trapped under the car.
Or…insert how many other edge cases? There are plenty of scenarios where it shouldn’t pull over, aren’t there? Training the myriad unique situations and proper responses just feels untenable, at least with current technology.
Code that identifies if anything is stuck under the car would be useful for a lot of cases but especially if an accident already has happended.
Besides that, hard edge cases will always exist and can only be solved by a human (or an AGI?) in the loop. But they are't too common, so just detecting that the situation is not solvable by the algorithm, doing nothing and waiting for a remote operator should scale well enough.
Yes, and it sounds like a fairly fundamental flaw. Does the car have sensors that can determine pulling over is the wrong thing to do in this situation?
In general, getting out of the way is the right course of action, but this clearly shows that there are exceptions. I'm not sure that the vehicles are currently equipped for differentiating to even be possible.
See the pinned comment at the top. Seems they showed an official only half the video of what happened, and neglected to show the other half which showed the stopped vehicle start moving again with the victim still under the car.
yeah, that's a pretty blatantly terrible cover up, definitely not the sort of behaviour you'd want from a company who's allowed to test experimental tech on public roads.
In previous discussions Waymo and Cruise were typically lumped together — “self driving bad” — usually by the original article even! However, my personal experience both as rider and as former Google employee says that Waymo is holding itself to a higher standard and therefore having higher order problems. That’s a lot of nuance for a flame-y topic but this permit revocation is rather unambiguous and I am having a smidge of schadenfreude as a result.
It's fair, I had the same sense (and am also former google) and wondered if I was the only one. It always seemed crazy to me to lump Waymo and Cruise together, but I never had a water tight argument for why.
I have the same sense but even in this discussion I see one angry comment about, “those companies” that doesn’t seem to distinguish among Waymo, Cruise, and (in context, I think) also Tesla.
I had an epiphany about self driving recently late at night on the streets of San Francisco. It was a somewhat deserted part of town, and the roads were empty. There was a lone Cruise car chugging along and constantly stopping at red lights. The signals were so badly optimized that the car would be the only one waiting at a completely empty intersection for minutes at a time, only to be stopped again at the next one, and the one after that. A single mile of empty road must have taken this car 15+ minutes to traverse. All the top engineering, sensors and ML algorithms in the world and the car was still at the mercy of a basic city planning failure.
We have been conditioned to think of autonomous driving as the answer to the traffic nightmares in every city, but tech will never ever be able to solve a social problem (just like how building a wider road will never ease congestion). Had even a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into self driving so far been spent towards, say, improving sidewalk quality, making traffic lights smarter, putting sensors along roads, coming up with a standard communication protocol for these sensors, building out public transit, improving urban planning etc. over the last 15 years, we would all be living better lives today. But a VC would rather set that money on fire to have a small chance at a 100x return.
To have the city planning work correctly you kind of need participation from the cars. I.e. if the traffic light infra structure knew the destination of every car it could do things more globally optimal.
So in that sense, driverless cars will actually help because of kind of nuanced reason. My guess is that there will only be a small number of driverless car companies (tesla, waymo, cruise, apple, etc) and it'll be much easier to add regulations that those companies need to send their destination data in realtime to the traffic light infra. I think that would basically be a non-starter for peoples personal cars.
> To have the city planning work correctly you kind of need participation from the cars
Perhaps for the optimum solution, but you can get a _lot_ better (than things are at the moment) without that. There are plenty of cities that use sensors and cameras to adjust traffic light timing throughout the day, and have done for some time (In the 90s I studied the system used in Sydney, which had already been in existence for some time then). But these things cost money.
Also, you don't need driverless cars for destination data - anyone using Google/Apple Maps/Waze, or even any recent car's inbuilt nav system can provide this.
And I reckon that even with the optimal solution in this regard, you'll still end up with traffic jams, as individual cars take a lot of space. Start thinking in terms of mass transit, cycling, and city planning to allow walking to the shops.
You're right the sensors help a lot too - but if a city doesn't have them then thats physical infra that needs to be bought and installed. Unfortunately, this isn't that easy any more in the US at least.
Maps/Waze data is a good point and I saw an article recently that Google is providing anonymized data to cities to help them optimize their traffic lights.
The one thing the driverless cars get you is the ability to traffic shape. You could imagine cities granting permits to waymo/cruise/etc only if they support dynamic pricing (or dynamic taxes, whatever) and dynamic routing to help distribute vehicles more evenly in space and time.
On the public transit thing... mainly because shared driverless EVs are basically a form of mass transit and I think a really good one. You can see some of my other comments on why...
Maps/Waze can also shape traffic by suggesting different routes.
One interesting half-way-there solution (and this is a technical solution involving cars, not reducing them as I'd much prefer) would be to have nav apps be able to read the traffic light timings for the intended route, and give you a suggested speed to travel at to maximise green lights and/or traffic throughput. It would piss off cars that want to go exactly at the speed limit, but would probably end up getting them to their destination faster.
In both cases, cities could offer incentive schemes (e.g. points -> $ or discounts off licence/registration fees) to encourage people to 'follow the computer'. Would probably be cheaper than building infrastructure.
The streets are otherwise empty - they don't need any data other than there is a car that just left a red light - it will most probably get to the next light in (calculate based on the speed limit) so we can turn the light in time. We typically have sensors in the road so we can detect which lane the car is as it goes through the next (now green) light and so make predictions and turn the next light green (sometimes two lights - one if it goes straight, one if it turns). Sure when there are two cars it becomes more difficult, but even then we can do a lot to time lights so most of them are green if you go straight.
Self driving car technology could be (at great expense) be used on all the cameras in a city to get a better picture of where people are really going and thus turn lights green to cause the least waiting.
Most cars sit at a light burning fuel and thus emitting CO2. Then they use a lot of fuel (read CO2) to get up to speed and at the next light that fuel is turned into heat by the brakes (hybrids can do some recharge, but they are not 100% efficient so there is still a lot of CO2 for no work)
That is how the lights in SF work. Presumably the Cruise car was traveling in a place where that was not set up, broken, or perhaps just slightly slower than the normal rate so it would always miss the lights.
I don't think that's true. Often times at night, there are long times for certain lights so the bigger throughput street can have more time on there. Human drives know about this, and will take different routes to get there. It's unclear that Cruise is mapping out light timings and their changes, although you would think they would.
I take point with your use of 'correctly' because traffic engineering cannot get every car to its destination without stopping it even if it knew every destination.
Cars already do talk to various traffic lights via underground sensors and occasionally a camera. The investment required to have a fully networked traffic light system with a centralized controller would be immense, and would create an organization with a natural government given monopoly.
Your use of 'correctly' paints a world that seems ripe for more corruption and ultimately worse timings across the network. If you wrote 'better', then I wouldn't have commented. I think I'm nitpicking
This is getting into traffic research territory - i.e. given the entire dataset (current and historic) can you shorten average trip time vs individual cars just doing whats best for them. Either way, having a real time data infrastructure seems only positive.
Traffic lights are already remotely controlled by city planning departments, it's the software that's missing. My whole point is that driverless cars, where the city enforces data sharing and maybe even some routing, can have a real impact on throughput times.
The best part is that most of this is just software. And not ~$2B to make a 1.7 mile subway line or 10+years to make a bus lane (see SF)
I agree with you that the idea seems intuitively like it would be better, however I'm skeptical that it will work and that it is the 'correct' way to run traffic.
To quote your own example, this will be controlled by the government, which takes a long time to do physical infrastructure projects. So I would lately just assume it's not worth the investment dollars.
That’s the best part. The pooled driverless EVs doesn’t require any physical infra for the govt to build or buy! It’s one reason I think we’ll get to a more optimal future vs public transit which requires big govt programs and building.
Waymo or Cruise cars on the road today aren't talking to any city infrastructure. The companies are not talking to each other. Heck even cars from the same company aren't communicating to try and coordinate some kind of traffic pattern or share data. The entire current approach to self driving has been a dead end from the start.
Yeah they aren't talking to city infra now. My point was that it will become easier to make that happen once a larger % of the cars on the road are self driving.
Because that's what happens to companies when they run out of cash to burn and still don't have a viable business. What do you think happened with Apple's massive self driving car division? Or Uber's? Lyft's? There are dozens of failed companies in the space already. Ultimately GM and Google are going to run out of patience as well.
In this specific case:
- is there customer demand? Yes. ppl want to move around cheaply, safely and efficiently
- is the technology capable? Yes. I've ridden in a waymo, it's great.
- what is the first principle cost of a ride? Lower than uber (which is a succesful business btw). Sure there is extra hardware but that goes down a lot at scale and you don't have to pay a driver which actually lowers your costs more than you think (no breaks, a lot less hardware in the car, etc)
I don't see anything structurally wrong with this business that makes me think it has a higher lilekihood of failure than any other random business. Sure a particular company may not execute well and go under, but I think there will be some sucesfful self driving companies in the future.
I think that future is a long way off for lost places. We haven’t seen these really proven to be ready for most urban environments. We haven’t seen them perform well in randomized conditions (road work, emergencies, marathons, critical masses, etc). We see them do well in good weather and predictable traffic conditions.
I’d love to have better transit options, whatever that looks like (including driverless cars), I’m just skeptical of us getting there on a large scale anytime soon.
I have and it's working. Right now. In a city with crazy traffic. And construction. And techno pessimists putting cones over their lidars. In the rain. 24/7. It's fucking incredible.
> But a VC would rather set that money on fire to have a small chance at a 100x return.
Blaming VCs for public policy failures is fair when they lobby to create those public policy failures. In this case, it seems like their efforts (lighting money on fire) are likely to improve pedestrian safety, so it doesn't seem fair to blame them.
Just because the population of SF is rich doesn't mean SF is rich.
Cities have very weak abilities to raise revenue, and are relentlessly politically attacked whenever they try to raise more revenue via higher property taxes and other things.
Our cities are actually starved of revenue and especially post pandemic at risk of bankruptcy without bailouts from higher governments.
I always envisioned a kind of world peace where all car manufacturers got together and in a not-designed-by-committee way developed a mesh protocol where vehicles and “the city” (i.e. traffic lights, railway crossing and so on) could communicate data to each other in order to ease some of the limitations of current autonomous driving technology.
Or we could link them together to make it safer so one doesn't veer off the track, maybe get nicely furnished stations where people can switch over to another set of linked cars to get where they need to go. Imagine the possibilities!
If you can sell America on trains, I don’t care what roundabout pathway you have to take to get there, I’m for it. If it’s just self driving cars on a dedicated roadway, fine by me.
>but tech will never ever be able to solve a social problem
I don't know where this mantra came from but it definitely falls in the risible category of leftist rhetoric. Technology has already solved multiple social problems, most obviously the advent of telecommunications itself solving the problem of coordinating actions at a distance. But more embarrassingly, the solutions you propose in the following paragraph are mostly technological.
Having a big flat 4-way intersection is an antipattern. If you have a major road (2 lanes in any direction, or over 30mph) intersecting another major road, then traffic lights just shouldn't happen. You get pollution from starting and stopping, T-bone collisions etc.
This is an infrastructure issue. Culturally I sort of understand how the US ended up with bad walkability and bad public transport. But what I do not understand is how road infra is so horrible.
As an extension of the argument the comment you're replying to was making:
Many (most?) intersections in the Netherlands have early detection systems that change the light _before_ the car reaches it.
But they didn't just do this for cars, they also do this for bikes. And public transit gets signal priority allowing buses and trams to almost always get green lights.
They've spent the money improving transportation of all forms, not just cars.
and for a long time you could drive on Great Highway at 35MPH and hit green at every single light. Always enjoyed that except that I would have preferred 50MPH
It should be illegal to drive above 25mph on any street that pedestrians regularly cross (i.e. all urban non-highway roads). Your enjoyment of speeding does not supersede other people’s right to not get struck by a car going 50mph.
5.5 billion gets you a bit over 2 miles of subway in nyc [1] these days, hardly the public transit revolution needed to make autonomous driving redundant
This is just anecdote, but having taken trips in both Waymo and Cruise in SF, I feel very comfortable in Waymo: it drives carefully but confidently. It alerts me when cyclists are near when I'm getting out. It navigates coned-off work areas. Cruise required a lot of (remote) human intervention during my trips.
Does Cruise have a screen like Waymo that shows you what the car "sees"?
Context: When sitting in the backseat of a Waymo, there is a tablet-sized screen that shows you all the cars nearby. And humans! On one of my first trips (at night), it took me a while to figure out what the white circles were. And then I looked over and saw people in the shadows! It was honestly kinda spooky that the car was much more aware of nearby humans then I was...
I haven't taken a Cruise, but I've used Waymo several times and my experience mirrors yours. I've seen Cruise cars on the street get confused and back up traffic enough times not to trust them.
I have a friend who interviewed at Waymo to be a safety driver. He told me they have a human at command central monitoring the car and the safety driver, talking back and forth. I see no reason why they would remove the human monitor after no longer using safety drivers. For liability reasons at least. My point is I'm not sure Waymo cars can actually be considered self- driving since they have a remote human standing by to take over.
I don't think any operator has a 1:1 correspondence between vehicles and remote operators. Remote operation is intended to be used when a vehicle has realised it can't handle the current situation it's in and needs external assistance.
Seems like Cruise doesn't actually have this. If so, why aren't we hearing a report from the remote driver? Why did the remote driver let the car drag a woman? Why do remote drivers let Cruise cars screw up over and over again, block emergency vehicles, etc...
If I'm right, then Cruise will have to add remote drivers and then we can call them remotely operated cars instead of driver-less cars.
They have this, by their own admission and from my personal experiences in the car. A detail you might be mistaken on - they’re not really fully driving the car remotely. They’re basically sitting in a call center answering questions for the car or plotting a course, or giving it the all clear to proceed if things are uncertain. And generally this only happens if the situation is one where the car can ‘safely’ stop and wait for a response. In situations like the one discussed here, the car doesn’t have time to wait for a response from a human operator, so it just does what it thinks is best locally.
No one was sold anything yet. These things don't go from 0 to 100 overnight. We've assumed that self-driving cars will be safer than humans in the future, though that's yet to be determined. And even if their safety record is better than humans, they will be more dangerous in different ways than human drivers, much like this recent incident where the woman was dragged and pinned.
Musk has repeatedly stated that Teslas on FSD/AP are safer than humans, now.
You can take issue with the veracity of his claims (and I certainly do, on several levels), but let's not pretend like "no-one is selling this, yet" - let's also not forget, "The driver is only in the seat for legal reasons. The car is driving itself" - that was six years ago now.
Tesla's Full Self Driving is driver assistance software and is not an autonomous vehicle[1].
There are rules governing autonomous vehicles in California. They must report all accidents involving their self driving vehicles[2], miles driven, disengagements,... Tesla's FSD does not follow these rules.
Tesla's marketing may imply that FSD is an autonomous vehicle. However, today, in California, these are driver assistance programs and not self driving cars.
Given the DMV’s wording I’m waiting to see if anything in the official statement doesn’t hold up, but from Cruise’s statement, this incident is absolutely not a good vindication of human drivers, either:
> The [human-driven] Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV. The AV biased rightward before braking aggressively, but still made contact with the pedestrian. The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. The driver of the Nissan Sentra fled the scene after the collision.
They are. Not one has ever tried to harm me, and I encounter them daily. I can think offhand of a dozen human drivers, motorcyclists and cyclist who have.
And snake oil salesmen exist everywhere, not sure what your point is.
Are you saying that they should all be equally safe? If so that would require a level of oversight and control (plus knowledge share?) not typically seen in US government, no?
I agree in principle, I’m not defending them at all. However this is exactly what much of the US wants, given how much de regulation and reduced “red tape” is often argued for.
Until then, we’re going to get some companies that put everyone’s lives at risk. Hell Tesla alone has over promised to insane degrees (the Full in FSD). I don’t see companies having less power any time soon.
One wonders WTF they were thinking. Were they so sloppy they just forgot to show the video? Were they hoping DMV would never see it? Either way it's a terrible stupid and short sighted mistake. A major problem for Cruise is convincing governments their technology is safe and responsible. Hiding evidence is not going to help that case.
> Either way it's a terrible stupid and short sighted mistake
Uh, 'Mistake' is a really generous word here.
Cruise isn't some amateur one-man startup. It's a multi-billion dollars company with tons of lawyers, advisors, resources, support from GM, etc. It was a deliberate act full-stop. The only 'mistake' they made was probably thinking they could get away with it.
As a pedestrian I'm not a fan of being an unwitting part of a private company's beta testing. Before this devolves into whatboutism vs the safety of human drivers, my opposition is to adding yet another unknown safety layer to walking down the street.
Usually when private companies are developing products that could kill, drugs for example, it is on the company to exhaustively prove the safety and effectiveness before launching it to the public. It seems odd that self driving cars have been skipping this step.
It's just that, in practice, it's almost certainly impossible to reach safe self-driving cars without a period of 'public beta testing', you'll just never get enough data and experience.
Not entirely unlike how there's a period for new drivers where they really aren't safe, but there's no way for them to become safe without going out onto the regular roads and gaining more experience.
"It seems odd that self driving cars have been skipping this step." is an opinion referencing well-known current events. You can't expect everyone commenting on this article to re-reference the saga of Cruise in San Francisco; especially when it's frequently covered on the front page of Hacker News.
Furthermore, you should know that a Hacker News discussion is not Wikipedia. These discussions are not the kind of things where every off-the-cuff statement needs to be backed up with references.
I have doubts about this too. I remember seeing a Humvee autonomously driving around the CMU campus back in 1998. I get the feeling research institutions and, now, product companies have been working closely with local city governments about safely releasing these into the wild for some time.
That's a question for regulators. What AV companies are doing is akin to human trials in pedestrian safety without consent. This wouldn't fly in another industry like pharmaceuticals.
Not really. Oharmaceuticals have many different tiers of trials, but even with that, there are still new discoveries and surprises once they reach the full population. Waymo has been testing their tech for over a decade in much smaller and controlled situations. Similarly, all of these companies also have done tests with humans behind the wheel for years. To claim that they've done no testing and are going straight to public testing is just plainly false.
You can argue about how much non-public testing is enough, but any roadmap for AV will eventually at some point have to include public testing.
Perhaps you know more than me about pharmaceutical testing, but people are aware that they're part of a trial, and more importantly, they consent to participating, correct?
I did not claim they're not testing, they clearly are. My argument is that people that didn't sign up to be test subjects are getting hurt in the process.
It's worth pointing out the discrepancy in human safety trials, is it not? Why should AV testing be less rigorous than pharmaceuticals?
The state ultimately is the one that is giving permission here on behalf of people, much the same way as the FDA decides when a medication is safe enough to be administered, or the FAA when a plane is ready, etc.,
It depends what you define as a "test". It's like how for Covid vaccines, antivaxxers were claiming that vaccines were still being tested on people despite it getting past phase 1, 2 and 3. At what point do you consider something to be "safe enough".
My point is that Waymo has done plenty of testing already. The question is, where do you draw the line? Are cars ever "done" being tested? Just like with drugs, you never know all the side effects for 100%, you can only make the error bar smaller and smaller, but eventually you have to distribute it to the public.
Same with the car, at some point they will eventually have to drive on public road. By your logic, they would never reach that threshold since they're still "testing" it.
They dont. This technology, aside from being infeasible at the level it would need to be to bring the claimed benefits, doesn't actually even have real benefits worth this dangerous development. If anything its a desperate attempt to keep private automobiles as the primary transportation system despite more communal, and public, systems being superior.
Its also a USian obsession. Some other places have been able to actually invest in superior public infrastructure but the US is so focused on techno-solutionism it, as usual, misses the extant and superior solutions. Self driving does nothing to mitigate the sprawl and atomization that wreaks havok on our society, but trains and busses, and density that cannot be achieved with car-dependence does.
No, the whole point of AVs, like any other product of a for-profit business, is that they make the manufacturers money.
A part of the sales pitch for AVs is that autonomy acts as a safety layer.
As with any sales pitch, the interest of the manufacturer is often more in getting people to believe the pitch than in it being true, validating that it is true is a concern of outside parties. Insofar as AV adoption requires loosening existing rules to allow them, that includes regulatory authorities.
Profitability will be needed for companies to succeed but it's not the point. Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
> Profitability will be needed for companies to succeed but it's not the point.
Yes, it is.
> Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
Yes, along with a pile of other moonshots. That's what moonshots are for.
There's a lot of profit potential in AVs, and even if you fail at it there is a lot of potential for profitable spinoffs of the research.
And if you fail at both, well, moonshots are high-risk, high-reward.
> Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
yes!!!
imagine if everyone that commutes could watch ads, sorry, use Google's valuable products and services for an extra 3 hours a day
> Do you think Google's main motivation behind starting AV work 14 years ago and incinerating billions on it over the years was really rooted in speculative profit years down the road?
Honest question: why do you think Google funded this?
I haven't seen anything that indicates they don't work well. My anecdotal experience is feeling much safer inside and around them in comparison to vehicles with humans behind the wheel.
There are plenty of anecdotes of AVs behaving terribly, but anecdotes are beside the point. Normally when a company wants to introduce a dangerous new product on the market the burden of proof is on them to prove that it's safe enough. For various reasons tech companies have gotten to do this in reverse by testing on the public to find out how safe they are.
What does the article indicate then? Everything working as intended? I am wondering if the pedestrian that was dragged six meters by a autonomous machine felt much safer.
The AVs do not work well in the edge cases - exactly in those situations where humans can apply common sense and behave accordingly. Exactly the cases that sceptics seemed to be worried about, and it turns out that the sceptics were right.
I hope AVs will not be allowed on public roads where I live in the next decades.
A safety layer that kills people in novel ways... GPs whole point is that companies should have to prove that they are safe, not just assert that they probably will be and then test on public non-volunteers.
It's wild that Cruise intentionally decided to hide the information of them dragging a person under the car for 20 feet from regulators. However, now that the news is out, their PR team says they showed the video to DMV folks while DMV denies that. Well, someone is lying and I bet it is Cruise.
Let me be very clear, if Cruise just collided with a person due to the mistake of another driver, that's cool. However, this is something way worse. Cruise car stopped, and then decided to drive 20 feet dragging the pedestrian under the car because someone on Cruise team designed a rule that says "if there is a collision, move away from the spot after stopping to avoid blocking traffic". No human driver will ever do that.
They are testing their garbage in dense urban areas. Too many times their vehicles just stop in the middle of the road.
If it rains, vehicle stops.
If the light is out, vehicle panics and stops.
Somebody puts a cone on the hood, vehicle panics.
If a single variable not accounted for in their algorithms shifts beyond expected range, it fucking panics.
So much money dumped/wasted into “autonomous personal vehicles”. How about we invest in making our cities more pedestrian, bike, and public transportation friendly? Let’s move people more efficiently rather than further digging ourselves into this hole.
Cruise's valuation of $30 billion will get you 12 miles of subway in NYC [1], hardly the public transit revolution necessary to make autonomous driving redundant.
I don't hate public transit or anything, I cycle and subway in NYC all the time, but the level of investment the US needs in public transit is an order of magnitude above the amount that investors have spent on autonomous driving.
>How about we invest in making our cities more pedestrian, bike, and public transportation friendly?
There are tons of companies that would love to help (get paid to) build out public transit infrastructure in cities. You think any major city would have trouble attracting bids to build tram systems, subways, or even buy more busses?
Look at your local leaders, how many of them are pro-public transit? How many of them have a long history of blocking projects because they want to "preserve neighborhood character" or some other lame excuse?
An advanced country is one where as many people as possible can go where they want, when they want, as cheaply as feasible. In the US, autonomous vehicles are the best bet for facilitating this in urban areas.
This is true - where I live only the relatively wealthy can afford close enough to schools to cycle to them. Anyone on a regular salary has to drive in.
Do you think the potential future where humans are freed from doing anything for their transportation (no driving, no pedaling, no steering, no danger, no waiting in traffic, etc) is worth some short term pain while we develop the tech? Was the pain and suffering during the industrial revolution days that have led to our current high tech world worth it? (I'm not just asking this rhetorically, I'm really interested in what you or somebody who agrees with you thinks about these things).
Alternatively if you reject the premise of those questions that this is a necessary phase to pass through to get to the other side, what do you think the impact on progress would be if no "real world" training opportunities were allowed for these companies? Do you think they'd be hampered and progress would take longer, and what would the impact of that be?
> Do you think the potential future where humans are freed from doing anything for their transportation (no driving, no pedaling, no steering, no danger, no waiting in traffic, etc) is worth some short term pain while we develop the tech? Was the pain and suffering during the industrial revolution days that have led to our current high tech world worth it?
Or more succinctly: "You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Sorry, eggs [regular people].
Ends justify the means thinking leads to some dark places (e.g. what kind of medical-technological progress would we be able to make if it was possible to do testing on humans like we do on animals?).
> Or more succinctly: "You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Sorry, eggs [regular people].
I'm not trying to make a statement or a point with the question. The original question is all that is part of the question. Please don't try to read more in than what is there.
> Ends justify the means thinking leads to some dark places.
For sure, but if we try to avoid any and all pain then we could still be nomadic people. Maybe life satisfaction then was higher, but certainly life expectancy wasn't. Just the death rate of babies and women alone was pretty dangerous.
> For sure, but if we try to avoid any and all pain then we could still be nomadic people. Maybe life satisfaction then was higher, but certainly life expectancy wasn't. Just the death rate of babies and women alone was pretty dangerous.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. Giving self-driving car companies free reign to cheaply experiment on the public is not the same as "avoid[ing] any and all pain" or avoiding all technological progress.
> You're presenting a false dichotomy. Giving self-driving car companies free reign to cheaply experiment on the public is not the same as "avoid[ing] any and all pain" or avoiding all technological progress.
I'm not presenting a dichotomy at all (unless you think the spectrum is binary and is only zero pain or non-zero pain, which I don't), let alone a false one. I'm not talking about just self-driving car companies. This is a broader philosophical discussion about technology in general, and how much pain is tolerable for progress. If you believe zero is tolerable in the case of self-driving, then do you believe that in general for all tech? If not, why is self-driving so different?
Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of self-driving cars is a world where humans don't have to labor for their transportation?
Edit: to clarify because people seem incapable of non-binary thinking, I'm not making an argument that Cruise (or any other tech company or car company or whatever) should be able to have "free reign to cheaply experiment on the public." That's not something I said or implied. I don't think they should and I think this California decision is probably a good one. There, can we talk about the higher philosophical issue now?
> I'm not presenting a dichotomy at all (unless you think the spectrum is binary and is only zero pain or non-zero pain, which I don't)
Then why are you saying things like "if we try to avoid any and all pain then we could still be nomadic people"? That seems pretty binary to me.
> This is a broader philosophical discussion about technology in general, and how much pain is tolerable for progress.
No, it's about who bears that pain. Is it the public or the investors? Obviously the investors and their apologists would prefer to externalize as much as the cost ("pain") as possible onto the public, and shame the public into accepting it.
> Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of self-driving cars is a world where humans don't have to labor for their transportation?
That's actually an irrelevant distraction, especially if for someone who rejects ends-justify-the-means logic. Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of unrestricted and unethical experimentation on humans is a world where many more diseases are cured and life is greatly extended (for some, at least)?
> Then why are you saying things like "if we try to avoid any and all pain then we could still be nomadic people"? That seems pretty binary to me.
Good question and thank you for the opportunity to clarify. My position/current opinion is that practically nothing in life can be done without some sort of pain or "harm" to self or another person. For example if the standard was "no harm", then there's no way we could have cars or motorized transport, or even bicycles for that matter. That doesn't mean that any and all pain is acceptable (that would be the binary view), but that basically it's a question of balance, not one of binary "yes" or "no."
> No, it's about who bears that pain. Is it the public or the investors? Obviously the investors and their apologists would prefer to externalize as much as the cost ("pain") as possible onto the public, and shame the public into accepting it.
I don't agree that is what the broader discussion is about, but I would certainly agree that "who bears that pain" is highly relevant to any concrete example, and certainly humans are much more accepting/tolerant of damage/harm that they don't personally have to bear. I would agree that investors should not be unilaterally making decisions on what harm is acceptable.
> That's actually an irrelevant distraction, especially if for someone who rejects ends-justify-the-means logic. Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of unrestricted and unethical experimentation on humans is a world where many more diseases are cured and life is greatly extended (for some, at least)?
This is a interesting point, and one I'll continue to think on. My initial reaction is that ends-justify-the-means isn't/shouldn't be binary either. Some level of ends-justify-the-means is necessary for nearly everything unpleasant we do in life. For example, I just cleaned the toilet (which I hate doing) because the ends justify the means: if I don't clean it, it will get disgusting, and having a clean toilet is great so I make the sacrifice.
That said, the broader understanding and common meaning of ends-justify-the-means is absolutely one I reject and I suspect we agree fully on: There are potentially great ends that don't justify unethical means. An example of ends-justify-the-means would be the Unabomber justifying his terrorism because on the other end would be a better world. I find that horrifying and very, very wrong.
> Do you disagree with the premise that on the other side of unrestricted and unethical experimentation on humans is a world where many more diseases are cured and life is greatly extended (for some, at least)?
I would not disagree with that, and I would agree that this is not on its surface a good reason to do the experiments. I think the non-binary part comes in on how we define "unethical" however. To some people unethical would include allowing dying cancer patients the option to try potentially life saving but still experimental drugs. To me, very little is unethical so long as the person is a capable adult, is fully informed on the process, has the ability to withdraw at any time, and provides full consent. There are quite a few people who would disagree with that however, so in practice I think we still end up at the spectrum rather than the binary.
I disagree on the endpoint. I think active transit is healthy for humans, and removing it causes people to need to excercise deliberately much more — and people don’t, causing obesity and a ton of health concerns. Walking 2-3km a day would be great for most people, and much better than sitting in an auto-pod.
Would it then also be better if people had to churn their own butter? Obviously not. Exercise is fantastic and should be encouraged. I think nothing would do more to facilitate human-powered transportation (walking and biking) than replacing distracted and dangerous human drivers with attentive and safe autonomous ones.
We should talk about para transit for the few people who cannot walk (or push their wheelchair) 2-3km/day. However this is a minority of people. As you say most people would be better off if they did move 2-3km more/day.
Do you think the patients who got incorrect blood test results from Theranos should suck it up and not complain because all progress is good progress, even if some people have to get sacrificed along the way?
Obviously not. That's an absurd question that's not even remotely based on what I stated or implied anywhere, let alone the question you responded to. This feels more to me like it's directed at some sort insane strawman who lives in an imaginary world of binary thought where everything is either fully good or fully evil, but if I'm wrong and this question is in good faith, I would encourage you to read the existing sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38004007
> Too many times their vehicles just stop in the middle of the road.
The problem in this case happens to be that the AV tried to pull over instead of stopping in the middle of the road, so not sure this is a great criticism to make.
According to Cruise's X(Twitter) account [0], the suspension seems to be related to an incident in which a human driver hit-and-run propelled a pedestrian in front of a Cruise AV and the Cruise vehicle couldn't avoid hitting the person. When that incident was first reported [1], it seemed like a situation where if it was a human driver in the Cruise vehicle, they wouldn't be found to be at any fault. However given this suspension, I wonder if there's more to it than that.
The article you link to says there was more to it! The Cruise vehicle, after running over the woman, stopped on top of her with the rear axle/tires pinning her to the ground, trapping her there. And it just... sat there. I hesitate to believe that a human driver would do something like that.
You could, however, argue that staying in place was the right thing to do; continuing to drive to get the woman out from under the car may have injured her further. A follow-up article[0] suggests just that, and emergency crews ended up lifting the car off of her instead of trying to tow it.
If this is indeed why their permit was suspended, it seems like a questionable reason. Some of the other dumb things Cruise cars have done seem much more obviously egregiously bad. But in this case the crash may have been unavoidable (by human or robot), and avoiding injuring her further by not unpinning her may have been the right move.
It's definitely unclear to me what to do if a person is trapped under a tire. Driving more may cause more injury or allow more bleeding from the existing injury. I guess a human driver would call 911 and the dispatcher may provide advice on what to do or suggest to wait for emergency services.
I think the bigger issue is the decision to move the vehicle after a collision involving a person not in a car. I've not had the misfortune to be in such a collision, but in the collisions I've been in, I would get out, and inspect the situation before taking any further action. Moving out of traffic is a good thing to do, but especially if there's a person, it's important to consider the situation before further movement. Even if it were just a vehicle to vehicle collision, I'd want to check if someone needed urgent medical attention, and acknowledge the collision with the other driver, make a plan for where to stop to discuss, and check for and clear any obviously sharp debris that may pierce tires of my vehicle or others' vehicle. A lot of that is outside the capability of an automated vehicle... but maybe human review before pulling to a safer place is a good choice especially if a person outside of a car is involved in the collision.
The DMV press release specifically cites safety-related misrepresentation as part of the basis for the suspension.
It may not be the performance of the vehicle in the incident that led to the suspensions so much as Cruise's performance in the investigation of the incident (or information about Cruise's prior behavior on safety info that came to light through the investigation.)
Yeah I get the sense (and I am absolutely not surprised) that they have been heavily downplaying the safety aspects. Like publishing the accidents per miles driven but only reporting under ideal conditions. I vaguely remember coming across an HN post about this very thing, a paper saying driverless car accidents under similar conditions as humans are much worse that was previously reported or something like that, and that the companies have been massaging the data.
"Video from Cruise reviewed by the Chronicle showed the woman was in the middle of the crosswalk and that both the Cruise taxi and the other car had a green light. The Cruise applied its brakes and attempted to “minimize the impact,” a spokesperson said, but it was unable to avoid rolling over the victim."
So a pedestrian was crossing a crosswalk when they didn't have the green light. It doesn't really make sense why neither the human driver nor Cruise car slowed down in that case and kept driving normally. Both should have stopped despite having the green light.
This is such a wild edge case though. So we think the vehicle should do what, keep driving, potentially causing more damage?
It's highly situation specific, and I'd expect the emergency personal to make the judgement call on how to free the person (potentially by taking control of the vehicle, or other means).
Keeping autonomous vehicles on the road will result in thousands of edge cases, and without a clear safety benefit (as opposed to Level 1 systems) its better to stop everything and reconsider.
Honestly, I don't think this tech will be able to ever be fully automated without controlling the environment as well (dedicated lanes). There's just too many variables you can't account for, and too much risk.
Is there a way to measure the (potential) safety benefits without putting these vehicles on the road?
I'm not saying that means we should just put them on the road, consequences be damned, but I'm curious if there are alternative ways to prove them without risking bystanders' lives.
> Keeping autonomous vehicles on the road will result in thousands of edge cases, and without a clear safety benefit (as opposed to Level 1 systems) its better to stop everything and reconsider.
True, but I bet either a Cruise or a Waymo would have stopped rather than hit that woman crossing the street, and they definitely would not have fled the scene like the human driver did.
I mean it did hit her (again), ran her over, then stayed on top of her. That's not a better scenario at all. A Level 1 system can still avoid hitting people.
Circling back to add some info. From this[0] page:
"But the DMV also said it was not made aware that the Cruise vehicle then tried to pull over while the pedestrian was underneath it."
Kind of proves my point. Stopping completely would have been more ok. The issue the DMV took is that it then pulled over, and that cruise withheld that information.
Oh, I agree. You may have loaded the page before my edit where I expanded on my first paragraph.
(I have my comments appear on a several minute delay because I know I sometimes submit a comment before I've made sure my intent was clear, but I maybe I took too long this time. It's a bad habit, and I know I should slow down, but... yeah.)
While appalling, this seems to be because the law has been set up to incentivize that behavior, not because the drivers fail to realize they've hit someone and/or panic and freeze up after doing so. Quite the opposite.
And people getting away with it -- even with video evidence -- seems to be an indication of police corruption. Which creates further incentive to do the wrong thing here.
To be fair, it’s not like we hold human drivers this accountable when they cause crashes.
We should be suspending all bad driver’s licenses, AI and human alike. Today we give people passes for crashing while driving badly, and we should not.
While clearly the initial accident was caused by the hit-and-run driver, when the Cruise went to pull over because it detected an accident, it drop on top of the pedestrian AND STOPPED right on her - "hurled her into the path of a driverless taxi that then ran her over, stopping on top of her as she screamed in pain".
This poor woman was involved in two accidents really, and it is fair to shut down Cruise until they address this failure scenario of driving on top of a victim in road.
If you read the follow-up[0], it's not clear that the Cruise car did the wrong thing. It may have been unavoidable for the Cruise car to avoid hitting her after she was thrown in its path, and if it had then tried to continue driving to unpin her, she could have been injured much worse, or killed (say if the axle or another tire had then crushed her chest or head).
These autonomous cars have done some truly dumb things, but I don't think this incident is so obviously bad.
Meanwhile, the human driver who actually hit her first, and then fled the scene, still hasn't been found...
And that is what is the unacceptable failure scenario. It'll be cool in the future, I guess, to have autonomous taxis. But I'm sure glad they don't test these in public where I live.
From the article, it sounds like the Cruise vehicle didn't just strike the pedestrian but stopped on top of her and pinned her in place. A bystander needed to recognize the incident and reassure her until emergency services arrived and mechanically removed her from below the vehicle using the jaws of life.
While not impossible, it's hard to imagine a human-driver scenario that would look quite like that, regardless of how legal accountability might resolve. Would a human driver stop their vehicle on top of the person they just struck? Would they then ignore the person they'd trapped and wait for a bystander to intervene?
I'm not suggesting that this scenario necessarily warrants the suspension, or that most of the same problems might not occur in some human-driver scenario, but it points to some of the subtle differences of human vs automated drivers that come up in exceptional situations. There are a lot of exceptional situations when driving and it very much matters how automated processes navigate them.
You're right, a human driver might not have remained in place. And as a result they would have risked further injury or death.
"“When it comes to someone pinned beneath a vehicle, the most effective way to unpin them is to lift the vehicle,” Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the department, said in an interview. Were a driver to move a vehicle with a person lying there, “you run the risk of causing more injury.”"[0]
Yes, but the Cruise dragged her for 20 ft first before stopping and pinning her. So it didn’t even remain in place initially, just after dragging her for 20 ft.
I was just trying to think that through a bit myself! Say this situation happens, the car is on someones legs, it realizes it, drives forward and forward is over the head or chest? It's hard to think how you would want to program it to react even if it was aware something was stuck under it. Interesting situation with AV's I'd not considered before.
Updating my comment to include this:
“When it comes to someone pinned beneath a vehicle, the most effective way to unpin them is to lift the vehicle,” Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the department, said in an interview. Were a driver to move a vehicle with a person lying there, “you run the risk of causing more injury.”
if people weren't VC brained they would realize that the way to prevent traffic deaths isn't to build fancy self driving cars, it's to invest in safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities
Society is not a monolith. The people and companies choosing to invest into self-driving cars are not the ones who would be able to make communities more pedestrian- or transit- or bike-friendly. As much tech as there is in the bay area, Google is not a local duke that can unilaterally make streets less car-dominant.
The people who can choose to make communities more friendly to other modes of transportation are the citizens who vote for representatives and laws, the citizens who show up at local meetings, and very often they fight against safer streets, sadly enough. Democracy is better than non-democracy, but that doesn't mean voters always make smart decisions.
Personally, I would LOVE it if American streets looked more like Dutch streets, or even German streets. But within US politics, wanting safer streets like those is an extreme position. Most people grew up with car dominance, and they're uncomfortable with or skeptical of the idea of actual choice in transportation modes. There's an enormous amount of cultural momentum behind forcing everyone to drive.
I would argue that it is less due to politics and "safe streets" being an extreme position and more to do with the fact that _entire metropolitan areas_ are designed around the car. It would literally require starting from scratch in many places to design a city around non-car ownership.
You can argue that it is a net negative that a lot of America, and most of the American west, was built and grew in conjunction with the car, but it is not entirely fair to say the only impediment is culture and politics.
> I would argue that it is less due to politics and "safe streets" being an extreme position and more to do with the fact that _entire metropolitan areas_ are designed around the car.
These are the same thing.
> It would literally require starting from scratch in many places to design a city around non-car ownership.
No, it wouldn't. This is part of the common set of myths that are promulgated around car dominance in America. There are many, many things that can be done to retrofit streets to be less oriented around car dominance, many of them not terribly expensive or time consuming (though admittedly the very best options do tend to be infrastructure that's expensive and time consuming).
For example, one thing Portland has done in some of its neighborhoods is to create neighborhood greenways, with concrete structures/blockers at some intersections that force you to turn, so that cars can't use the street as a 'through street' for commuting (but it's still possible to reach everywhere with a car for residents). This is fairly cheap and easy to do, it's just a matter of political will.
This is a big improvement that doesn't require redoing the whole street or anything, just a few concrete dividers and a little paint along a street maybe every four or five intersections, enough to make it impractical to use for longer-distance car commuting.
Some other things that are usually relatively cheap to add to existing streets:
* Automated speed cameras
* Roundabouts
* Chicanes
* Protected bike lanes, using basic dividers
* Dedicated bus lanes
* Better bus stops that at least have some kind of roof and bench
* Zoning rule changes that play well with density, like allowing light retail in currently residential-only zones, or allowing 'missing middle' housing
These are off the top of my head, but I know there are more.
I am very familiar with Portland ;), the green ways are cool for sure. Except if I am on Salmon or Clinton and want to go to Fred Meyer, I need to ride on 39th or Hawthorne at _some point_, which to a lot of people is a non-starter due to danger.
Besides, suburbs exist, and someone living in Sherwood who works in Portland, at this time, requires a car. And public transit would need to be either faster, cheaper, or more convenient (wifi, coffee etc) than driving for (most) people to adopt it over a car.
And Hawthorne is _super confusing_ now. Turning right from Hawthorne to 10th is a nightmare, you have a bus lane, a bike lane and a sidewalk to the right of you, all of which could contain someone. It is hard to accurately see all three "lanes" that you need to cross. Another example is the Hawthorne bridge onto 99E, the angle is below 90 degrees so you end up with a massive blind spot. I start looking for bikes/peds way before the off-ramp because I am used to it.. someone from out of town or who rarely drives in Portland is going to kill or injure someone.
> Except if I am on Salmon or Clinton and want to go to Fred Meyer, I need to ride on 39th or Hawthorne at _some point_, which to a lot of people is a non-starter due to danger.
That's what protected bike lanes are for. Basic ones aren't that expensive, really, the issue is more the road space. Cars dominate the existing space, and many, perhaps most drivers will scream bloody murder at losing any. They don't want equality and choice, they want dominance and everyone forced to drive.
> Besides, suburbs exist, and someone living in Sherwood who works in Portland, at this time, requires a car.
"Besides" nothing, you're talking about an almost entirely separate issue now. Obviously bikes aren't great for really long distance commutes for most people, they're more for short to medium distance trips. And yes, that's where public transit comes into play -- with people able to walk or bike to the stations.
> And public transit would need to be either faster, cheaper, or more convenient (wifi, coffee etc) than driving for (most) people to adopt it over a car.
Yup, that's where you throw in bus lanes everywhere. Places like London have heavy adoption of bus lanes that lets taking the bus often be faster than driving by yourself.
> And Hawthorne is _super confusing_ now. Turning right from Hawthorne to 10th is a nightmare, you have a bus lane, a bike lane and a sidewalk to the right of you, all of which could contain someone.
I admit that I'm not that familiar with Portland, but protected intersections are a solved problem. Takes more money than the other things I've mentioned so far for sure, but it's still quite doable.
I don't think it's even VC brained, the average us NIMBY doesn't actually want anything to change with regards to zoning or public transit. They don't care that the closest place to buy anything is a 54 minute walk with 0 sidewalks, because it only takes 8 minutes to get there in their Tahoe.
To be fair to the NIMBYs - most public transit investments have been done wrong.
Transit often doesn't get people where they want to go, when they want to go, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable price. If you are missing any of the above then you don't have a useful transit network and the car starts to look compelling. (cars are expensive, but the marginal cost of a trip is very low once you have one)
Worse, when transit improvements are done, often they are expensive and deliver very little useful changes.
With the above backdrop it isn't hard to see their point. That doesn't make them right, but it means if you want transit you have a lot of evils on your side to fight.
Yes, this but with an appreciation for that paradigm. I get to live away from the city center, in privacy, and can have a bunch of land and room for activities I want to do. This way I get to raise goats, have a woodworking shop, grow my own vegetables and still be 10 minutes away from restaurants/shows/nightlife in the city center. I felt like an animal the few years I lived in an apartment.
Where you live is a compromise. Sometimes I wished I lived downtown - but there are enough things that make it unlivable that I instead choose something else. However many of the things I don't like about downtown would be easy to change.
That’s not the way I see it. There’s no reason for it to be a compromise unless it’s purely financial. I have everything set up just the way I like it with the existing status quo.
You don't have easy access to the symphony, whatever museums are downtown, many restaurants, or any of the other things you could have. You have set yourself up a different life, but to get that you had to compromise something else.
I live in a rural buffer area, a 15 minute drive from a large downtown with theatres, restaurants, shows, festivals/parades etc. There’s no compromise here. None of that would be possible without good road and personal vehicles.
> None of that would be possible without good road and personal vehicles.
Would be very possible with good public transit. But that's the point. The average NIMBY doesn't want bus stop in their neighborhood. They don't need it. The only thing it would enable in their mind is people that do need it (poors, browns, etc) access to where they live. You don't spend $650k on a house and $80k on a Tahoe to have poor people riding busses around you.
That's the general attitude in my neighborhood at least when I describe why my old ghetto neighborhood was better in a lot of ways. Zoning allowed businesses nearby. I could walk 5 minutes to Dollar General instead of an hour. But I might have a black guy ask me for bus money, which seems like it would be a horrifying experience for most of my neighbors.
In a city like San Francisco, building self-driving cars is easier than building "safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure". Those changes would take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars, and will not address the fundamental social problem: people prefer to travel in a clean, quiet car by themselves. San Francisco does not have the political will to make its public transit effective, let alone clean, quiet, and safe.
That's what we all initially thought, but with a decade and a half of constant engineering effort and tens (maybe hundreds) of billions of dollars poured into the space with basically nothing to show for it, I wonder how true that assessment still is.
The cars are driving themselves, how is that nothing to show? Ultimately self driving will allow smaller buses and improve the pedestrian experience that way.
Cars were here yesterday, people loved them for their freedom.
Cars are here today, people love them and build communities around them.
Cars will be here tomorrow, and people will still love them.
freedom is not "everyone has a car". freedom is no one has to have a car to get where they need to go and do what needs done. for example, my favorite bar in my city is like .75 miles away. I would love to walk there, but functionally you can't because the two roads you need to take to get there are dangerous with limited or no sidewalks and extremely dangerous intersections (one is a blind corner where the cars are regularly doing 60 off of an expressway). if I could walk there (or even better, if I could bike there!) then I would be much much much freer to move about my home.
I don't hate cars! I just don't want to have to jump in a car to go somewhere I could easily walk
In a dense city car ownership is a financial trap. It’s a depreciating liability whose use is extremely limited by available real estate (normal people use the terms traffic and parking). (Also the number one killer of kids.) Lack of ownership is the point.
OP is not arguing against cars completely, they just have very limited use within high density city centers. Most people can travel by foot, bike, scooter, bus, train, trolley, etc... to get their daily errands done.
When you need to go further or out of the city, by all means, jump in your environment-destroying metal cage but you don't need it daily, I guarantee it. Please don't cite extreme exceptions like disabled people or families with 10 kids.
> Most people can travel by foot, bike, scooter, bus, train, trolley, etc... to get their daily errands done.
In the Top 10 US cities that have the density to support this, sure. Head out to the Top 100s and this reality falls apart very quickly. There's no economic incentive for businesses to be so well distributed through a dense urban core. There's differential zoning and mixed use that form the backbone of those cities economies.
The idea that we can just total re-engineer our cities and our social lives all across the country to solve a traffic problem that is not at all distributed the same way is insane to me.
Most deaths happen at night. Most deaths involve alcohol or drugs. Other common factors are speed, youth, and bad roadway configuration. A tree in the wrong place is lethal. Bad guardrail installations are lethal.
There is so much more to do than to put everyone on a bus and pretend that 15 minute cities are going to work.
Well we spend the last 60 years reengineering all our cities to be car-centric, so who's to say we can't undo that? Most of the top 100 US cities existed before cars, we just hollowed out all the urban cores in service of having ample street parking.
I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (the 244th largest city in the US) without a car. If they built a Trader Joes downtown I would have 0 issues being car free. The city has built a number of fully protected bike lanes downtown that I hope get expanded further into the greater community, and seems to be doing a good job of making the downtown denser as well. It certainly can be done.
> Well we spend the last 60 years reengineering all our cities to be car-centric,
We engineered them to be human centric. It's just that the humans had easy and reliable access to affordable cars and fuel. So, naturally, the market did what it does. When you say it's car centric you intentionally ignore any benefits or efficiencies that were created in that decision and equally imply that it was a top down decision.
> I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (the 244th largest city in the US) without a car.
Do you own or rent? Are you a college student or a resident?
> If they built a Trader Joes downtown
Why do you suppose they haven't? Should the government compel them? Why them and not some other chain? What if two chains want to compete for that footprint?
> number of fully protected bike lanes downtown
Do you bike in the winter?
> and seems to be doing a good job of making the downtown denser as well.
The population of Ann Arbor has been steadily increasing for the past 80 years. The last 20 years have shown no change in that steady rate. Any recent changes are very unlikely to account for the very slight continual trend.
You're just adding another layer of abstraction. Where does policy come from? It doesn't fall from the sky like some sort of cargo cult delivery. Further, your own link highlights what I'm saying here very clearly:
"Higher funding has been made possible by burgeoning state tax receipts as aggregate incomes, spending, populations and tax rates have trended upwards. However, this close link with tax receipts has made highway funding growth responsive to economic conditions and unemployment."
So.. higher incomes, more populations, more tax receipts. Specifically, highways are a function of _human demand_. There isn't some grand conspiracy to build roads just to make a handful of companies in Michigan happy.
> I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (the 244th largest city in the US) without a car. If they built a Trader Joes downtown I would have 0 issues being car free.
I live in a very very very similarly sized city in OH and I feel exactly the same way (down to the trader joes even). I do have a car and I often wish I didn't need it. My city is small enough that not only is a 15 minute city a feasible option, it could be a reality today with a couple small infrastructure changes.
Most cities in the US have plenty of density to support transit. However without good transit people won't ride and in turn this makes a death spiral where most less dense areas don't get transit at all, much less good. In very dense areas traffic is bad enough that people will put up with bad service, but in a less dense area they won't.
>more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities
This is a political problem though, it's not something businesses can solve.
Taxis are not quick or efficient enough to make the cost worth it to many people.
>door-to-door
Doesn't have to be door to door.
I use Uber all the time when on vacation to get to places of interest and then back to the hotel. Trying to incorporate public transit would have added 30-40 minutes of walking, no idea how much additional time waiting. Saving ourselves an hour or so per day of vacation makes it worth it for us.
Time is money. Look at how much time WFH has saved people, no that they don't have to commute. If anything, I would say the ability to summon an AV and have it arrive in ~5 minutes would be more beneficial when you're _not_ on vacation.
Dated but it says 66% of riders can find a ride within 5 minutes. I think 5 minutes is a good target.
With how subsidized public transit is, I don't believe these AV taxis could beat it on price... but they don't have to. They just have to make it low enough that the benefits of private travel outweigh the cons of public transit.
People tend to take less public transit when they become wealthier, not more.
No. Public transportation sucks. There’s no privacy and I have to walk to and from a bus stop. I have nothing against walking, I love it but I don’t want to do that when I have an upcoming appointment or return from grocery shopping. This pedestrian whatever only works in dense urban areas and if you live in apartments. What the hell do people in apartments even do? Just sit around quietly and watch TV so there are no noise complaints. I can farm, raise goats, woodwork and still drive to a city center in under 15 mins. Why would I want to give that up.
I’m an environmentalist and the solution is electric vehicles powered by renewable electricity. It’s not cooping people in tiny apartments and foisting dense living on people that don’t like it.
Well if you're objection is that public transportation currently sucks, yes that's the problem. It doesn't have to. That's the point.
That might be the first time I've seen privacy as a main objection. Not sure how serious that should be taken considering how much privacy has willingly been given up in the last couple decades in the name of convenience. And also how few cases where it would matter. Like does it matter if a rando can see one sit on a bus? It's not going to make a difference with companies and governments since they have so much electronic location data available, not to mention license plate scanners for private cars which also have electronic location data.
It’s not that it currently sucks. Even if it was the cleanest, safest, most connected system it still sucks compared to a personal vehicle (ideally electric and fully powered by renewable energy). It also means people have to live in dense apartments instead of spread out suburbs and semi rural living.
I don’t mean privacy as in personal data, I mean not having to be in close quarters with other humans.
Even if we accept that the personal vehicle provides a better experience for an individual in a vacuum compared to ideal public transit, we're left with the critical problem that if a significant number of people choose to use personal vehicles instead of public transit, then there will be so much traffic that the experience will be awful for everyone. This traffic will cause travel delays, noise, pollution (from exhaust, brake dust, tire dust, etc.), and create an unpleasant dangerous environment for pedestrians and cyclists.
> then there will be so much traffic that the experience will be awful for everyone.
Perhaps. It's also possible that current roads could carry vastly more traffic driven by autonomous drivers instead of people. As a regular cyclist, I would be ecstatic if even if every human driven car on the road were replaced by 2 autonomous ones. Buses are some of the worst vehicles to be around on city streets (huge, poor visibility, frequent stops, filthy diesel emissions).
Public transport has its place, especially in dense city centers and especially metros/subways. Those will always be more efficient and a better experience in cities. I’m not even opposed to completely banning personal vehicles in city centers. But only about 5% of the US population live in densely packed downtown areas of cities. For the rest of the folks we should have more cars and improve our road systems.
> "It also means people have to live in dense apartments instead of spread out suburbs and semi rural living."
> "I mean not having to be in close quarters with other humans."
Suburbs tend to be sterile and devoid of character, but I do agree that they promote living in a bubble away from other humans.
Why that is desired or a widespread model for living needs more explanation. Sure some people like to be hermits, but as a social species it seems odd and also a highly inefficient way to accommodate a larger population. Also peculiar if one likes true "wilderness", because more suburban sprawl means less of that.
And suburbs have got to be one of the key factors in the reported loneliness epidemic. With the reports of increasing prevalence of loneliness, seems odd to want the default way of life to be one that we both agree means living spread out and not close to one another.
And yeah some people do like suburbs. On the other hand, Irvine ca despite being such an upscale and model suburb, is like living in the set of the truman show: artificial feeling and boring. People often describe it as sterile or like living in an office park. The landscaping of suburbs, such as irvine, also tend to be environmental disasters on top of being utterly bland. It's lose lose.
Not to mention, car transport being the paramount design concern makes for truly miserable pedestrian life and running trails. Running next to 6 lanes roads with 55 mph speed limits is just a terrible experience - irvine is crisscrossed with them.
Not sure how one can have a better road system than irvine - but it doesn't end up saving the residents time - things are just more spread out and they have to driver further between them and then fight for parking.
We've tried a car oriented transportation plan for decades - it gets one LA traffic. Parts of the 405 have 12 lanes. If you build it, congestion comes. We've tried it for decades, it's horrible. What is it they say about trying the same thing over and over and expecting another outcome? Oops actually the i5 - 405 merge near irvine has 26!!! lanes amongst all the ramps and truck bypasses. Needs more, right?
At the very least the testing phase for self driving vehicles should not be taking place on public roads. I didn't sign up for some alpha test of potentially deadly tech, and no one else did either.
Bikes? If you mean e-bikes and motorcycles then maybe. Buses and trains? No it's not and it will never be. This is a position only a green extremist would take.
A fucking horse is better than any of those methods of transportation.
There are two crucial elements a car and a horse have in common:
The first element: You own it (or rent it) and you tell it when and where to go. The when and where part is crucial.
The second element: It has the capability of carrying not only you, but also an another person and cargo.
The only transportation devices that can do both of these things are a) cars, b) horses, c) bikes (kind of... two people and cargo on a bike would be pretty tough to do, let alone with any level of comfort).
The fundamental, unfixable problem with trains and buses is that you don't tell them when and where.
The future is in EVs or global warming. Personally I've had it up to * here * with all the green hypocrites so I say bring on the warming, let's fuck this place up if you don't want electric cars.
> It has the capability of carrying not only you, but also an another person and cargo.
The vast majority of car rides are taken by a single person without significant cargo. Nobody is saying we should eviscerate all cars, but _most_ of the time, _most_ people that use cars in cities don't actually _need_ to use cars.
I'm disappointed to hear this news. So many people are killed by cars every year. We just take that for granted. Self-driving cars have the potential to drastically improve this and save many lives. I worry that these regulators are weighing the costs heavily while ignoring the benefits of innovation.
That said, I don't have access to the data and I don't really know if Cruise has been acting inappropriately. I'm glad that Waymo seems to be generating far fewer negative press reports, which seems to be a good proxy for whether regulators are going to clamp down. So I hope Waymo continues to operate successfully (and expands their service to me in particular) and I hope that Cruise improves their system and gets back online.
[2] Not just fail to stop, but fail to reduce speed when turning off into a heavily congested side street with visual distractions, blind spots and a pedestrian crossing.
For some reason, I can't imagine literally any human driving quite like that?
Presumably this is why the permit is being suspended:
"The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet."
First of all, I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large. I'm sure the Cruise car recorded the plate and they passed this to the police.
Second, the corporate speak on the Cruise release is very good. Notice how it says "pulling the individual forward", in other words, the car dragged the person while it attempted to get out of the way. I guess nobody thought about that edge case. And they released a completely irrelevant simulation showing that if the other car had been an AV this wouldn't have happened. Yet, the real issue with the Cruise AV is that after a collision it just blindly tried to pull over and it dragged the person. The same thing would have happened if the person had simply collided with the car on their own.
> I find it ironic that the human driver is still at large
Ironic but completely expected. We have normalized and accepted the awfulness of human drivers to a degree that people just don't comprehend. Human would be terrible drivers even if you ignored the fact that many of them are chemically impaired, even if you ignored the fact that they are prone to rage and aggression.
As we consider the safety of self-driving vehicles, there is going to be a disorienting amount of cognitive dissonance as we are forced to confront the awfulness of what we already accepted and have been living with for a century. There were over 42,000 deaths due to motor vehicle accidents in 2022. That means if we created self-driving cars that were twice as safe as humans, they might save 21,000 lives per year and also kill 21,000 people per year. That sounds insane, but it would be a sane way of improving an insane situation.
Kibitzing about these individual incidents is a normal and inevitable human way to try to deal with the problem, but we need some way of measuring how deadly self-driving cars are in comparison to how deadly human drivers are. I never see that, so I wonder how we're going to know when we should loosen the reins on them? Are regulators actually doing their jobs, or are they just going to move inexorably forward while occasionally throwing bones to public outrage?
The stakes here are huge, tens of thousands of deaths and horrific injuries per year, and we will unnecessarily kill lots of people if we deploy self-driving technology too fast or too slowly.
The way this will probably work out in practice is regulators choosing the path of least resistance between uninformed public outrage and greed-driven industry pressure. What we should be asking for is a data-driven approach.
If a human being had done that they would have absolutely had the book thrown at them. There was a case where a woman was drunk driving and hit a man, he came up over the hood and into her windshield. He was alive but bleeding. She drove home and parked her car in the garage. He bled out through the night. NO ONE was sympathetic towards that woman.
But if an automated vehicle does it, it just becomes a line item that someone somewhere has to pay. You watch, someone will start offering insurance for that liability.
What we should be doing is making it an existential crisis for these companies. That will never happen and thus self driving vehicles will become good enough and that's it.
> If a human being had done that they would have absolutely had the book thrown at them.
Really? If they had been in a car accident caused by another driver, and took a few seconds to pull over because they were unaware they were dragging a person initially hit by the other driver, they would have been charged?
It's very hard to hold people responsible, and it's telling that you had to cite such a grisly and outrageous example. Unless you're drunk or it's a hit-and-run, you're unlikely to face any charges beyond a traffic violation.
> You watch, someone will start offering insurance for that liability.
Of course? Exactly like we've mandated for human drivers since the 1970s?
All this hand-wringing about things that we've accepted our whole lives with human drivers.
I'll say it again: we need data-driven approach to figuring out when autonomous vehicles reach the threshold of becoming less deadly than human drivers. If we jump the gun and allow widespread adoption too soon, people will die unnecessarily. If we drag our feet and allow widespread adoption too late, people will die unnecessarily.
> Really? If they had been in a car accident caused by another driver, and took a few seconds to pull over because they were unaware they were dragging a person initially hit by the other driver, they would have been charged?
unless you believe this person stayed completely silent during this, the answer is yes. The measuring stick that the law tends to use for liability like this is the reasonable person test and no reasonable person drives 20 feet with someone screaming in pain after having HIT their car.
Are there circumstances in which someone would NOT be charged? sure, there have been cases of toddlers running out in front of cars and it was determined the driver couldn't possible have seen them due to their height.
Since you apparently misunderstood, the point about the insurance is that maybe we shouldn't allow companies to insure themselves against killing people. We as a society absolutely went after Ford for choosing not to do recalls because the estimated cost of the recall exceeded the estimated payout for the deaths and injuries. Under no circumstances should we allow companies to make decisions like this.
Sorry but this just comes off as completely out of touch to me. Yes, I agree that there would be a legal case to charge someone in such a scenario. But what actually happens, at least in NYC, is that the cops and prosecutors will bend over backwards to give a driver the benefit of the doubt.
Cruise showed the DMV a video that cut out just before their car dragged (ran over) the pedestration. Effectively they were trying to do a hit and run as well by not showing footage of their car's behaviour that caused the injuries.
This is just a general problem. Companies very often kill people and get fines. The body count before a company starts to get close to "this might kill the company" is absurdly high.
Consider, the Dalkon shield which had a hospitalization rate of 5 in 1000 and a death toll easily in the 1000s (maybe 10s of thousands). [1] The company went bankrupt but not defunct. It is now a part of Pfizer. Nobody experienced any sort of jail time in association with the deaths (and, after it was banned, they started selling the dalkon shield in poorer regions).
A serial killer killing 10 people gets the death penalty, yet there exist mining companies that have easily killed 1000s of employees with silicosis (and are still operating today, looking at you Dow [2]).
yep, this is why I said it should be an existential crisis. mistakes happen, but if your mistakes can potentially cause bodily harm you better be damned well prepared to show how it was not negligence in any way or you should get a fine that scares the shit out of you.
But that's the idealist side of me talking, the realist understands that will never happen.
Yeah, the big issue we have is that we reward ignorance. It's in the legal best interest for companies producing physical products to be as oblivious as possible to issues of safety. Legally, the worst the worst outcome for them happens when there's documented evidence of safety problems. It's far better to feign ignorance. "Who could have predicted that opioids were addictive!". "How could we have known that this doctor was overprescribing, we are a big company without the resources to track everything".
It should really be the opposite in an ideal world. A company that has documented "this is what we did to make sure everything was safe" should less culpable than the company that moves fast and breaks things/people/the planet.
If a company killed someone, I'd want their defense to be a list of everything they did to prevent that person from dying, not a "well shucks, accidents happened, and this was a tragedy that couldn't be avoided!". That's the response that should end a company's existence.
You can punish the manufacturer of any item that creates an excessive danger to the public.
Lawn darts aren't intended to be thrown near people, and don't exist anymore because people used them negligently. Human-driven cars are used negligently and kill 40,000 Americans a year.
“We” have done nothing of this sort. SF is its own trashfire and they just gave up on enforcing any traffic violations except parking which brings revenue. You can look this up in their own stats for this year
The issue isn't even that Cruise was involved in an incident. They were not at fault for the collision and were only involved after a (human) driver launched the victim into the Cruise vehicle. Cruise had their permit suspended because they essentially tried to hide their involvement/responsibility and withheld video footage from the DMV.
My theory is that we’re just going to read about a never-ending (but possibly increasingly rare) series of edge cases. And in every one, it’ll be dismissed as “oh that was a really rare edge case” yet humans would have been able to make a better choice in the same circumstances.
> The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet.
Jesus Christ! Good riddance, I'm glad their permits are revoked. Can you imagine witnessing this and watching an autonomous vehicle slowly crushing and dragging someone underneath? That 20 ft must have felt like forever to witness. Let alone experience.
Really wish there was a way for tech (especially new AI tech) to wholesale abandon the city. Even just move south to the actual Silicon Valley. The city picking winners and losers like this is untenable
I don't know how to respond to this. If you screw up there needs to be consequences that bite. Suspending their operations is better than some meaningless fine and actually punishes them. If you can't see that, I can't help you.
Note this is suspending operations indefinitely with no pathway back. No "take these steps and we'll consider re-instatement". Basically a death knell. Moreover, the city had requested the DMV do this to Waymo as well (the state DMV just declined).
So yea, this is the city working to regulate driving, like it regulates housing and small business i.e. to the death while favoring incumbents that are far worse.
Cruise operates fine in Austin and Phoenix. They could just move their operations to South San Francisco or further south and be better off.
The city simply does not deserve the presence of tech, and for tech companies their presence in the city seems counter-effective
"The DMV has provided Cruise with the steps needed to apply to reinstate its suspended permits, which the DMV will not approve until the company has fulfilled the requirements to the department’s satisfaction."
Reading this, it rather seems like the AV wasn't at fault in the accident itself and handled itself well. However, after coming to a complete stop, while the pedestrian was still on the ground in front of it, it then started again and drove into the pedestrian and continued for another 20 feet pushing the pedestrian along (and presumably under) the car. They say it did this to leave the car in a safe place, but this differs drastically from a normal driver who'd get out and look round the vehicle before moving it anywhere.
I'd say the initial hit probably did a chunk of damage to the pedestrian, but quite likely not fatal unless their head hit the ground. But then being driven over and dragged 20 feet is going to be pretty scary and in all likelihood cause more serious injuries than the initial impact.
> Reading this, it rather seems like the AV wasn't at fault in the accident itself and handled itself well.
Probably because you're reading their press release. Their previous press release was even more convincing - they somehow forgot to mention the part about draggin the pedestrian at the time.
Here they somehow forget to mention the car has already accellerated to 18mph while a pedestrian was still crossing the road.
I get your point, but on the other hand if a pedestrian was crossing on their when the light turns green and the pedestrian was already clear of the lane, I think most human drivers would also proceed. I'm in a different country but, both as a driver and as a pedestrian, I witness this exact situation on a daily basis.
I'm not trying to detract from the horrible outcome of this case, but the problem wasn't the car pulling away at a green light when there were no obstacles in front of it, but the way the car decided to move itself to a "safer place" immediately after an accident when it clearly didn't have enough sensors or the AI wasn't trained sufficiently on this kind of situation to be 100% sure that it was safe for it to make the maneuver.
> but this differs drastically from a normal driver who'd get out and look round the vehicle before moving it anywhere
That is an optimistic view of the likely behavior of your hypothetical driver. Hit and runs are commonplace. Dragging struck pedestrians around isn't all that uncommon either. Panicked motorists frequently make very bad decisions.
“The Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV. The AV biased rightward before braking aggressively, but still made contact with the pedestrian. The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet. The driver of the Nissan Sentra fled the scene after the collision.”
"A dark colored Nissan Sentra was stopped in the adjacent lane to the left of the AV. When the light turned green, the Nissan Sentra and the AV entered the intersection. Against a red light, a pedestrian entered the crosswalk on the opposite side of Market Street across from the vehicles, passed completely through the AV’s lane of travel, then stopped mid-crosswalk in front of the Nissan Sentra. The Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV."
So there was this woman crossing a crosswalk in front of these two cars when she shouldn't have. I guess I don't understand why neither car stopped in front of the crosswalk when they saw this woman in the middle of the crosswalk (illegally).
IMO it was a bit aggressive for Cruise to have seen this woman jaywalking and still crossed the crosswalk after detecting that the woman had just passed the car but still in the middle of the crosswalk.
Incidentally, "jaywalking" will be legal in California in 2024, finally. Hopefully that will be the beginning of the end for those laws across the rest of the country.
(Of course, we're talking about crossing "when safe", not when you'd be walking into the path of a vehicle with the right of way.)
That's like the only time in Texas a pedestrian doesn't have the right of way in a marked or de-facto crosswalk; if there is a cross signal and it's red.
Have you driven in San Francisco or basically any large US city? If cars had to stop like that to give extra space for a jaywalker that had exited the path of travel, someone would rear end the AV, or at the very least the driving experience would be very jarring. If we wanted to legitimize this case then probably large areas of downtown in cities should be redefined to be free-for-all traffic with low speed limits.
I don't know if this was a homeless woman or not but there's plenty of times I've seen in SF of some mentally disturbed homeless person in the middle of the street.
In those situations I would 100% stop completely in front of them and/or drive very slowly around them. The difference between a regular jaywalker and someone who is mentally disturbed is the mentally disturbed jaywalker is unpredictable and you have no idea what they'll do next.
The right decision in this case was for both cars to at least slow down if not stop in front of the crosswalk. The Cruise car driving normally just because the walker happened to just pass to its left without slowing down doesn't seem like the best decision.
Slow down to a crawl, definitely, but if you stopped until they got off the street completely, you might never move again in some areas of SF (the accident happened near Market Street).
And it's not a given that doing so would make the situation safer, as other drivers would eventually drive around your car.
Normal drivers stop or proceed slowly through intersections when pedestrians are in the road regardless of whether the person is supposed to be there. With great power comes great responsibility.
Anyone who doesn’t slow down in situations like that is a waiting to be like the Nissan driver: a person a-okay with committing manslaughter.
And two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because some human drivers are negligent and horrible doesn’t mean we have to accept robots varieties that are also bad.
> IMO it was a bit aggressive for Cruise to have seen this woman jaywalking and still crossed the crosswalk after detecting that the woman had just passed the car but still in the middle of the crosswalk.
Wat? (Most) pedestrians aren't squirrels that hang out in the road running back and forth. You've put forth an unreasonable standard that basically nobody uses. Except for maybe those "special" types of drivers that will slam on their brakes and wave at you when your intended path was clearly behind their car after it had passed, as if you're supposed to be thankful for their putting themselves in your way to indulge in a simulation of altruism.
A good human driver may have slowed down from perceiving the emerging exceptional situation of the oncoming car not reacting to the pedestrian, but I'd say that's a much different framing than what you asserted.
That wasn't what I was referring to. This is in reference to a jaywalker. My point is both cars should have stopped when they saw a jaywalker crossing the street.
It doesn't sound like the Cruise car stopped because it basically saw that the woman had just barely crossed to its left out of its path of travel.
A more cautious driver would have slowed down at the very least or stopped completely.
This sort of nonsense where you take a serious statement and tell me the cutesy "name" of the autonomous vehicle really detracts from the seriousness of the issue. Also, the last paragraph where they try to talk about how their vehicle wouldn't have made the same mistake as the human driver, glosses over the actual issues the cruise car had which a human driver would have known not to do.
I had the same thought about the name. They also didn't refer to the name again in the rest of the article, so it wasn't even setting up a convenient name to refer to the vehicle and distinguish it from other AVs; it was entirely superfluous.
Ya, and since a Panini is a pressed sandwich, you'd think the PR people would immediately remove that since it's comparable to what the car did to the woman's leg.
"Cruise gives the cars cutesy names" is typical of fast turnaround journalism. The reporter doesn't have the time or resources to investigate the details to determine if this is indicative of a casual culture at Cruise. Instead, they can drop the easily verified vehicle name and let the readers fill-in-the-gaps. It doesn't exactly line up with CA DMV suspending the AV permit, but it adds so-called depth to the story.
I wouldn't expect this offhanded fact in long-form, slower journalism. But I expect this from Reuters.
In their original press release they didn't even mention dragging the pedestrian. Here they've only mentioned it because they were caught red handed by the DMV.
From my limited understanding, web browsers were improved drastically by the creation of cross-vendor testing (e.g. Acid tests). I wonder if there is a way to do some sort of AV simulator testing that would allow us to test the different manufacturers on data collected from the others.
AVs seem to all have different "mental models" of the external world, so it seems like we've got a lot of work before we can pipe data collected from this Cruise incident into a simulator and test Waymo, Uber, Tesla, etc.
> then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet.
That’s a pretty enormous screw up and not one I’d heard about when this was initially reported. Interesting the statement from the DMV implies they were lying…
Just this morning on my bike ride to work, a Cruise car was sitting in the middle of a road after turning right at an intersection. It was almost blocking the road entirely. The cherry on top was the Waymo that was stuck on the other side of the intersection because of this. People were not happy and had to snake their way around the Waymo.
Having ridden in Cruise cars a couple of times, I am glad I was able to ride one while I had the chance. The novelty factor was very high, and while being hard to hail + very slow, it was a great thing to show to visitors to the city. Hopefully these safety issues can be resolved. As a biker, I feel much safer around a cruise than your average prius.
This has got to be a huge relief for Waymo. Cruise's atrocious safety was bad press for Waymo every single time it hit the news, and would be a significant contributor to local sentiment against all AVs. It's like OpenAI; when you're leading in a product category and your name is synonymous with the tech, other people's failures with the technology make you look bad.
I feel safer as a cyclist and pedestrian in SF with Cruise and Waymo vehicles driving around than I do any other vehicle.
At least the autonomous vehicles actually follow the rules: they are patient and always watching the bike lane and crosswalks. I've never had one try to cut me off, make an illegal turn, or aggressively turn into me while in the crosswalk. These things are daily occurrences for me with human drivers due to the sheer lack of traffic enforcement.
Cruise started as a fake-it-til-you-make-it operation. See if you can find their first demo video. That mindset apparently continues.
Waymo has been very cautious. This turned out to be much harder than expected. Waymo's stats get better each year, and it looks like this is going to work.
I took one ride in a cruise car in San Francisco. A person on a moped in front of me accidentally dropped their phone on the road. The person stopped their moped in the middle of the road but the cruise car insisted on continuing and started jerking around.
Later, the car in front of me was going down the hill and my cruise car kept accelerating and then braked very hard once its sensors were able to see that something was in front of it.
It was an okay experience, but I’ll be honest, I don’t think I would be willing to take myself in it again or my family anytime soon. And honestly, I can’t believe that moped driver didn’t get hit/I didn’t get whiplash.
I had a Cruise driverless car here in Austin, TX blow through a cross walk and get really close to me. I had a broken leg at the time and was using a walker. I almost hit the cruise car with my walker.
Before this, I was really impressed by Cruise and actually bought shares in General Motors because I was so blown away. But yeah those cars aren't perfect. However, maybe a human was controlling the car when it blew threw that cross walk? I would not be surprised if a person were to do something like that because people drive horrible all the time, but I would expect better from a computer.
Maybe that's part of the problem? We have bad drivers who are ultimately writing the software that controls the cars.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. If someone from Cruise happens to read this, try and add some code to prevent these cars from blowing through cross walks with people in them. (I'm not sure what the law says about this, but my interpretation is that if the cross walk sign is lit up, and there's a pedestrian in the cross walk, you should stop. Maybe it's okay to go if they haven't made it to your side of the street yet, but you should never get so close to a pedestrian that they can strike the vehicle out of anger with an object.)
Well, the problem is that our AI systems don't have a clue.
At all.
They are classification systems. They have no understanding whatsoever of anything around them. Which means it is likely that the AV which is the subject of this accident didn't understand that it hit a person, what a person is, how a person could be stuck under the car, how a person could be dragged by a car, how a person could be hurt by a car, how a person is more fragile than a car, why it might be better to not move in any of the above contexts, how a human driver would more likely get out of the car and make sure it was safe to move (and render first aid), etc.
We are calling this crap "Artificial Intelligence". It isn't. It is not at all. It's a parlor trick devoid of anything that resembles understanding. A dog understands the world far better than the most advanced self-driving-car.
This lack of understanding issue carries with it layers of significance. For example, a human driver understands consequences to his/her actions. Yes, of course, there are a-holes in every crown...yet, the vast majority of people are good. If that were not the case society would not function as it does. Lacking the concept and understanding of consequences, just assigning scores to things and path planning accordingly, removes important decision-making layers and drives suboptimal AV decisions.
You can add responsibility, fear, financial consequences, emotion, care, consideration and a whole host of human condition realities to the list of important factors completely lacking from AV's today.
Driving is fine when reality is reduced to easy-to-classify monotonically varying experiences. Not so easy when reality becomes, well, real.
I've said this previously when a self-driving Uber killed a woman, and I'll say it again:
I don't understand why authorities allow self-driving cars to beta test out in public. I thought Waymo was the best of the lot with something like millions of hours on the road and no incidents, but when they started accepting passengers, it failed to proceed past a traffic cone on a sunny day:
The government should initiate a comprehensive test on a self-driving car's capabilities. In their current form, I wouldn't trust any of the others like Tesla and Uber that think self-driving is as easy putting it out on the road. And that too with Tesla and their cost-saving no-LIDAR nonsense.
These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from beta testing out in public.
"Ultimately we develop and deploy autonomous vehicles to save lives." Of all of the self-serving counterfactual horseshit I've seen sneak out of a corporate mouthpiece that right there might take the cake. Y'all deploy AVs to make money, The End. If saving lives was a primary goal GM would have stripped center console infotainment displays out of their vehicles a decade ago, or maybe never put them there to begin with.
I don't know why something like this gets trotted out in every self driving thread as if it's some sort of clever point. One thing being dangerous does not automatically make the shiny new alternative safer. General purpose self driving literally doesn't exist yet, and when it does it might be even less safe than human driving. Assuming that it will definitely be safer because of some highly constrained testing doesn't track, regardless of how interesting the tech is or how much money investors hope to make from it.
How many of those deaths per year are human drivers driving the same routes at the same hours in the same weather as Cruise vehicles? Without any normalization this comparison seems moot.
The same linked website (iihs.org) says between 30-60% of all fatal accidents involve alcohol.
I strongly agree that the safety comparisons aren't anywhere near the same ballpark. They are just too apples to oranges.
All that said, I don't think that means we can't evaluate whether they're safe in the limited contexts they're being deployed in. We just have to be aware those statistics are only as good as their context (weather, geography, terrain, traffic patterns/devices/laws, social norms, etc).
I'm initially most hopeful for constrained environments (city, low speeds, parking) and Waymo in particular, because of the house amount of investment and very thoughtful and cautious strategy in terms of deployment.
Making something illegal doesn't stop some people from doing it, so it's something that should be considered when looking at the overall safety of human drivers. One benefit of robots driving is that they won't get drunk, get distracted because they had a stressful day, get drowsy but still try to make it home, speed because they're late for an appointment, etc...
I don't get it, someone's clearly willing to break the law if they are drunk driving, unless you're banning steering wheels I'm not sure how that's going to help.
They have that, and these cars completely depend on it for fundamental parts of the stack. If they detect that their understanding of the scene doesn't match their map, they (generally) have remote operators clarify the best course of action for the car. This isn't a remote takeover - they just plot a path for it or select from a number of different options the car presents to them, or give it the all clear to proceed.
I worked in the AV space for years - not at Cruise - but during one of my first driverless rides in a Cruise car, we ran into a few blocks of SF where the power was out. About 3 street lights in a row weren't functioning. At each one the Cruise stopped completely for about 45 seconds before crossing - even if there was no traffic coming from it's left or right. That delay was so that a remote operator could clear it to proceed after it detected that there wasn't a functioning street light where it expected there to be one. After the first street light we were getting honked at and swerved around by cars behind us while it paused and waited for clarification.
Comparisons between the safety of robotaxis and human drivers are strange to make when 'robotaxis' still depend on remote operators for fundamental parts of the driving task
Cruise has exactly that. In this case however, the car decided to "pull over" autonomously after the incident, before a remote driver could get involved, and with that pulled the struck pedestrian 20 feet along the ground and pinned them under the vehicle. If it instead alerted a remote driver immediately and waited for their decision before moving again, this would've likely ended much more lightly.
Some of the players in this space do this but it doesn't work because driving via streaming video over the internet is nowhere near as effective as a human driver. And is simply not possible in a fast moving emergency, only being helpful if the car gets stuck and won't move
its not really helpful for split second judgement calls like this. If your pizzabot is stuck behind another pizzabot or can't figure out something, ok. But this happens before anyone can intervene. The switchover + time to comprehend and react remotely aren't going to change anything.
What's the ratio of humans back at headquarters ready to take over vs the number of cars active on the road? That's a really interesting number that I don't think I've ever seen reported anywhere.
It does feel like a lot of these weird/longtail situations should be more quickly resolved with some better combination of letting a human override in person (like when a AV car blocks a firetruck) and/or quickly getting a human to remotely take over, but yet we keep seeing these reports of where the car does something dumb for a long period of time. Is it as simple as they don't have enough employees on-hand to intervene?
Good. These things have been a real danger around my neighborhood. They are not currently safe. They do not understand crosswalks, and will drive towards pedestrians who are on them until they move. Additionally every time i've encountered a safety issue Cruise have not been accessible to take the report. So I went above and beyond to make sure i reported it. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-autonomous-vehicles-feedba...
Their behavior reminded me of Uber's behavior..frat bro ... do anything... killing it, etc mantra yet people's lives are at stake here.
I've been writing my distaste for Cruise for the past few month or so here, because of this. Of course getting downvoted by those with skin in the game but c'mon you can't act like how Travis Kalanick did...you are pushing technology onto the streets that can kill people! As well Waymo (Google who im no fan of) has been working on their robot car tech since 2007 ... Cruise no way for that long.
There were reports they are pushing their tech onto many city streets. Sorry to say and hopefully other cities/states follow CA's lead!
Commenters like this understand that doing a hit-and-run does result in a human losing their license, right? We don't revoke all human licenses because humans are unique individuals, not a hive mind controlled by a shared common program. Similarly, the DMV is not revoking the license for all self-driving cars. It's only revoking Cruise.
I think that a suspension pending investigation and possible remediation is appropriate.
I realize assuming this is the California DMV's line of reasoning is speculation, but this sentence from Cruise's own public statement on the event really does it for me (emphasis mine):
> The AV detected a collision, bringing the vehicle to a stop; then attempted to pull over to avoid causing further road safety issues, pulling the individual forward approximately 20 feet.
The tricky thing about these vehicles' control software is that it has absolutely no judgment or common sense. That's really on display here, where the vehicle immediately goes into a canned program instead of following a course of action that takes into account all the details of the situation in which it found itself, not just the ones that its creators had anticipated.
That doesn't necessarily mean that testing self-driving cars on the roads is inherently irresponsible, but it does mean that the ground rules for how we manage such programs need to be tailored to the situation. What we have here is a situation where a rather nasty software defect has been discovered. We can assume that this defect is present in all of the vehicles Cruise is operating on public roadways. It is therefore reasonable and prudent to temporarily suspend autonomous testing operations on public roadways pending analysis and remediation.
Because, let me emphasize again, TESTING. Pausing to analyze and iterate when you find problems is an essential part of testing. It's arguably the main thing that distinguishes testing from just YOLOing shit into production.
If an individual driver did what the cruise vehicle did, then I would expect a suspended license during investigation. It just happens the AI diver is the singular “driver” for an entire fleet.
the Cruise dragged her 20 feet and rolled over her leg though. Obviously this is mainly the other drivers fault, but self driving cars need to be able to react properly to unexpected scenarios. A reasonable human driver would not have continued driving with a person trapped under the car.
I saw a Waymo in my neighborhood stopped in the middle of the road. Cars backed up behind it, and the driver quickly took over and accelerated. The car then returned to driving 20 mph in a 25 mph zone.
Tesla is going to smoke these companies. Theirs is the only software trained on high quality actual driver behavior (which they can pull from their fleet because they have telemetry in the form of a real-time safety score for every driver).
It's like every other company is trying to write an algorithm to construct strings, and Tesla has GPT-4.
The people behind the wheel of the Tesla are taking full responsibility for the car's actions, whether they know it or not. No such driver exists in Cruise's case.
I understand why so many people hate Tesla, but they aren't allowed to drive fully automated without a human monitoring them, so not the same situation.
not sure if you're trolling or not but last i heard people simply strapping an exercise/weighted wrist band to the steering wheel which simulated torque being applied to the steering wheel which leads a Tesla to believe someone is paying attention. A quick search on Youtube reveals more than a few videos confirming this.
It may have been true at the time, but now Tesla uses the interior camera to make sure you are paying attention to the road.
If you don’t want to use the FSD beta, you don’t have to activate the camera, or you can put tape over it. With either of these actions the user can opt out but will not have the ability to use the beta.
No I was being serious. Searching turns up defeating the system with someone in the seat but not without. The other commenter provided a video showing it is possible from two month ago.
Be honest though, no one is doing this. At most some hacker messing around, but it's not at scale at all like the other companies. And even then, that's the fault of the driver, not Tesla.
That would be Autopilot or Enhanched Autopilot. Those with the real FSD Beta have to deal with in-cabin camera tracking which includes gaze detection to make sure you are paying attention.
My wife was telling me a new Prius she was driving freaks out and audio alerts if she looks away from the road. That sounded irritating but that car didn't claim to be self driving.
Yes, but the quality of the self-driving Tesla has is 10x less capable than Cruise - I don't know anyone who actually uses "self-driving" with any degree of confidence.
Related: robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks just wrote up an incident where a Cruise cab he was riding in stopped suddenly in the middle of an intersection, nearly causing a bad collision: http://rodneybrooks.com/autonomous-vehicles-2023-part-ii/. Consistent with the discussion here of Cruise cars being dangerously timid.
We, I mean humanity, need an example that L4 self driving is possible.
When SpaceX showed that private company can access space and build a product in the area world changed.
Startup founders, investors, government changed their opinion and many space companies were created and trying to do things that they would not even consider before SpaceX: Astra, Rocket Labs, Planet Labs, Firefly, etc
If we get one example of self driving as a product on the roads, it may have the same effect. We are going toward self driving winter and unless Cruise, Waymo or similar companies will do the impossible new iteration will happen in 10+ years.
It is mentioned in the text that in Q3 GM spent 700M on Cruise.
Not that many companies in the world:
1. have similar level of talent as engineers at Cruise
2. can spent similar amount of money
3. are willing to spend them
And we need all three.
There are so many corner cases that without large scale as close to the real life deployment as possible...
I feel very sad.
P.S. Worked for 3 years in a self driving company, till our division was sold :(
I took a Cruise for the first time a month ago. It arrived and it sat there for almost ten minutes. It kept telling me that my ride was getting ready. Someone from the operations center also called into the car and asked if I was ok and reassured me the ride would start soon.
This was at night with zero traffic. I have no idea why it took so long.
When the CPUC was set to vote on expanding Cruise’s operations several months ago, SF first responders and other residents spoke out against expanding operations. CPUC ignored all the feedback and concerns and voted to expand. I believe the press pointed out the CPUC people that voted to expand Cruise operations would benefit off the expansion (can’t recall if they were former employees or tied to the driverless industry). But despite emergency responders giving numerous examples of how dangerous the cars were in emergency situations, they were ignored.
I was in SF last month and saw a Cruise car get stuck in an intersection on Divisadero. I have no idea what it was trying to originally do, but it kept just going back and forwards perpendicular to the incoming traffic. After about 5-10 mins of that, it looked like someone took remote control and got it out of the intersection.
Any speculation on how big a deal this is for the prospects of Cruise as a competitor in the AV space?
As far as I can tell, they were open in 4 metro areas (SF, Austin, Houston, Phoenix). So this is their original testing zone, and 1 out of 4 of contemporary zones down.
Will this impede their ability to retain and expand existing zones?
Safety is certainly a huge concern with this class of vehicles. But by programming these cars to drive extremely conservatively, they cause disproportionate congestion as well. This seems to be underplayed in approval discussions around these vehicles, but is a major cost.
Are there any reliable statistics of something like accident per mile driven that compare between autonomous vehicles and human drivers?
What I found so far is this:
- Waymo and Cruise have driven about 8 million miles driverless (mostly in San Francisco) and reported about 100 crashes (mostly minor like scraping shopping cart, etc) and many that were fault of another car. (as of September 2023)
- Apparently a human drives am average 100 million miles between fatal accidents. In that case we do not have enough data, yet.
I'm not sure what to think. Is the rate of accidents a cause of concern? Or is this blown out of proportion and driverless cars are actually safer? Or (most likely) we simply do not know, yet?
Until cars are capable of simulating real-world human decision making (of a smart and considerate driver), it's not going to be enough. It simply won't be possible to eliminate all the teeny tiny liability laden edge cases otherwise.
From Europe and wasn't aware there currently were at least 2 different self-driving cab companies already operating in (at least some parts of) the USA. Feels like I just aged 15 years in 5 minutes
The large opposition to AVs gives these companies zero-margin for error especially in a place like SF. Hopefully they'll be back on the road soon. My experience in Waymos have felt much safer than the average Uber.
Let’s agree that Waymo and Cruise are not in the same league. I don’t use AV in general anymore, I explicitly differentiate between Waymo and everyone else.
As someone who has had FSD for the past 2 months, I would never trust it with left turn merges into fast lanes, any weird situation (I’ve seen it deal with construction fine but once an excavator was blocking the road and it kept trying to inch forward in the smallest of gaps even though it was clear that the only solution was to wait till it was off the road) and extreme turns (>150 degrees).
My drive to work is 20 miles and a really good stretch of that is just 1 lane where I’m stuck behind a car or the road is empty. In those cases I have no problem letting FSD handle everything, the road is extremely hilly, bendy, lane lines vanish every once in a while and it’s fine so I do find it useful at times, though not worth 200$ a month by a long stretch. I’ll probably cancel the subscription soon.
Its problems appear very clearly whenever it needs to accurately predict what other cars on the road will do to make its decision. It is honestly horrible at that and while a few times I tried to not intervene, I realized I was just creating a nuisance and now stopped allowing FSD to deal with those situations. It is also bad if there are wrong lane lines (happens at one final stretch of my daily drive)
Finally, as someone working in AI, I’m actually very optimistic about their next approach of just learning an end to end model to drive the car. I think this is the only scaleable way to reach human level driving. Any set of rules based + optimization based planner will have those edge cases that ruin the cars capability, in fact it turns out the long tail is really long. When a human is not drunk and focused he is a remarkably good driver. On the other hand, if you just need to capture the edge cases data and add it to your training set to solve it, you can capture all the possible driving conditions that come up on road. This reminds of how there were hundreds of failure modes and jailbreaks for ChatGPT early on while now there are close to None, presumably because they just added them to the training set. If a good human level self driving car appears, I’m convinced it will be an end to end approach, whether the Tesla team are capable of this, who knows.
Also for those who think, OpenAI’s scale based approach only works for language, I have access to ChatGPT Vision and its capabilities astound me. Scale for sure works
> Finally, as someone working in AI, I’m actually very optimistic about their next approach of just learning an end to end model to drive the car. I think this is the only scaleable way to reach human level driving. Any set of rules based + optimization based planner will have those edge cases that ruin the cars capability, in fact it turns out the long tail is really long.
Tesla doesn’t have an end-to-end model. They call it “end-to-end AI”, which just means they’re applying AI to all subsystems, exactly like everyone else. All the big players already use heavy ML-based planning systems that are not “rules or optimization based” and which are way more sophisticated than anything Tesla has put out or is planning to.
We don't know if that's actually true. Tesla claims "end-to-end AI" in their next iteration, not an "end-to-end model". Wayve [1] is the only one who has an end-to-end model that takes video input and outputs a trajectory, but they are still doing one-off demos.
Thanks for digging in and providing sources. The Vice article seems to have been updated to include that Cruise is contesting the narrative where they withheld the full video. It seems like this story is still playing out.
> In a statement, Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow disputed that Cruise failed to provide the full video during the first meeting with the DMV. “I can confirm that Cruise showed the full video to the DMV on October 3rd, and played it multiple times,” Lindow told Motherboard in a statement.
It's always fun when the Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" ethos meets real world government bureaucracy and regulation.
Filling out forms with made-up bullshit just to get an approval works great when you are putting together a SaaS sales presentation, not so much when it's the state Department of Transport on the other end and you are working on matters of public safety.
So much is discussed about self-driving car safety because the implications are really big but also uncomfortable. However, I always get stuck on how little enforcement there is for human drivers who habitually break driving laws and cause dangerous situations. DUIs are one thing sure but honestly most drivers who are bad and dangerous are sober and face no consequences for reckless behavior.
Is there something specific that caused this halt on Cruise's testing permits?
Automatic enforcement of driving laws should absolutely be a thing. People often argue "but they can't prove who was driving the car!" Its simple answer to me. Whoever registered the car is by default responsible for the actions of the car.
If that car gets found doing something obviously illegal (speeding, running a red light, some kind of "reckless driving" camera review, etc) the registered owner is automatically assigned blame. They can potentially file paperwork to the court to prove someone else was driving (a lease arrangement, some valet ticket along with some proof from the restaurant or whatever at the time, a sworn statement from another individual confessing to it, etc). But ultimately by default the owner of the car is responsible for the safe handling of the vehicle. If you're worried someone is going to break the law with your car, don't give them your keys. If you don't like this, find another form of transportation.
Tag enforcement needs to be stronger. If an automated system sees a tag that doesn't make sense, it should be immediately flagged and enforcement dispatched. Lots of cops already have ALPRs, those should immediately trigger. I see so many cars out there with sketchy paper tags, this whole thing needs to be shut down.
Driving a car on public streets shouldn't be nearly as easy as it is in the US. Far too many people don't treat driving with the respect it needs.
Not sure about the specifics here but to jump on your point about human drivers not being safe...
10000% we need safer designs for streets and roads, better education, automated enforcement of speed limits, dis-incentives for larger/heavier/more dangerous vehicles, ...
All of these things need to be done, and can be done with existing technology today. We don't need self-driving cars to address our problems; they're essentially a distraction and an excuse to postpone improvements.
Why the down votes? This seems like a reasonable discussion to be had, unless you're a binary thinker and think that anyone raising a point about humans must be secretly, implicitly arguing that cars should be able to do whatever they want.
I'm glad that it's becoming clear to more people that Cruise and Waymo are at very different levels of maturity. Waymo is so far ahead that it's hard to see anyone catching up. We really need some alternative so there isn't a pure monopoly 10 years from now. I'm not sure there are any mergers that would bring anyone close ("two turkeys don't make an eagle" and all that).
Good. While people may argue that these things are safer, their success will only lead to the development of more car centric living spaces. Streets will be wider, harder to walk, less people centric. IMO its cheaper in the long run to just have transit and bike lanes.
As long as we mix human and machine control, I think we will continue to have problems. If we take humans out of equation somehow, we may eliminate a lot of edge cases like this. Self driving cars need their own lanes. After that, we could couple them together. Then maybe put them on rails...
After the CPUC voted to approve the self-driving expansion, the same people that tried to block self-driving cars there pulled two regulatory levers.
First, the California DMV, with result seen here.
The incident that triggered this event happened when a human driver, who is still at large, hit a pedestrian who flew into the path of the Cruise vehicle.
The car executed a maneuver to pull over for a safety stop, but failed to recognize the woman who was dragged some distance.
Second, they reached to the Federal agencies via Nancy Pelosi’s office, with primary focus being the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The request was to gather data, which given the friendly posture of the NHTSA at this time will likely result in the opening of an investigation.
Both of these moves have some bite. The California DMV can suspend licensure as happened here.
But they’re fairly straight-shooter civil service types in the end, and they’ll eventually clear the vehicles for use. You can see this in part because of the action against Cruise only, rather than Waymo.
Some may attribute this to Waymo’s greater political sway in California. But my experience of the products themselves is that Waymo has a higher quality self-driving system.
The NHTSA is a bit trickier to predict.
The NHTSA’s powers are broad in theory and as granted by statute. They could theoretically issue an order to remove a type of vehicle from the road for imminent threat to public safety.
However, their typical modus operandi is to issue recalls and work with the auto companies. They won’t want to test these powers under the current court, so my opinion is that they won’t take much action.
I ran a non-profit website in Brazil where schools could look up a question-by-question breakdown of how their students did in the high-school exit exam. I was a bit flummoxed by the process of maintaining a decently sized database with that data, and realized that there were only so many visualizations I'd need for it. So, over a week, I just had an algorithm compute everything I would need for each school for the several million students in the db, and then handily save a file for each institution with that data in an S3 bucket. No databases, no complex logic, just a few pennies of cost for S3... and it made building out the visualization such a breeze!
I do not understand why we're letting these companies test autonomous cars without someone clearly on the hook for both financial and criminal liability for each car.
Really disappointed at the suspension. Seems like a knee jerk reaction, although cruise should have been more transparent.
At this point we should have 4 or 5 self driving car companies testing on public roads not just 2 companies (Waymo and Cruise I don't count Tesla to be self driving but driver assist, the 2 are waymo and Cruise), in Two cities (Phoenix and San Franscio, although LA< Houston Dallas coming soon).
In 2015 I anticipated by early 2020s we would have self driving taxis in a dozen US metro cities not just two. What can we do to accelerate the transition towards this fantastic future? Also Canada so far behind.
I just started seeing Cruise cars driving around Santa Monica this week. Are they already paused in SF and we're somehow later or is pausing just a SF thing?
I know that the geography of North America and the timing of industrialization basically made this a pipe dream…
Yet, trying to create near-peer artificial human driving intelligence—just so cities can continue to be designed around horseless carriages, minivans, and truck nuts—well, that may not have been the best solution to the problem.
Ideally, autonomous driving would be for “the edge” of a transportation network. Like a house on a dirt road, or a camping site, or the home of a misguided friend who moved to south Gilbert, AZ ;)
You shouldn’t need to be watching for basketballs and red lights on interstate highways. Everyone is going the same direction for long distances between transfers. Cars are often individualism, which I’m certainly not against.
The arrogance of “driving driverless should be easy” probably comes from a lot of people seeing driving as a part of their basic humanity. The car is nearly a cyborg extension of their mobility and physical power.
Me? I just wanna get to the concert. Take the humans out of the equation where it makes sense. I’d rather go with light rail; not my friend who offered to drive, then road rages over a merge, then follows some minivan psychopathically for a few minutes (true stories).
We shot ourselves in the foot because mass transportation in America has failed to impress us as much as a Jaguar XK or Jeep KJ, or whatever your Soul Car is.
> We shot ourselves in the foot because mass transportation in America has failed to impress us as much as a Jaguar XK or Jeep KJ, or whatever your Soul Car is.
As much as I'd like to agree with this, the fundamental problem is that most people in the US do not work at a single point in the city anymore.
That's the real problem. You don't get to connect existing enclaves. You have to build your mass transit, fund it at a loss for decades, make sure it doesn't get overrun with crime, and maybe after 10-20 years there will be enough housing and office space along the line in order to make it viable. Maybe.
Or you can throw down a couple more roads and let people figure out where to live, themselves.
But like. We can certainly innovate more flexible routing systems of transport that don’t require specific neural training and licensing to use foot pedals to stop it crashing.
(Maybe I could have reserved some of those neurons to be better at drumming!)
What stops us from using modular mass transit systems? Lots of things. But when mountains stopped trains, we exploded the mountains. Built huge bridges over ravines.
Because of the period between 1850 and 1970, I don’t buy the excuses. Unless it’s just “we’re still not there yet.”
I'm hoping personally that driverless cars will enable new build out of mass transit by allowing for greater freedom in last mile transport, we'll see :)
Greater density in cities too because fewer car owners means less need for parking. And probably fewer people will want to live in suburbs, today owning a car makes the suburbs a little more appealing because you don't have to deal with city driving and parking.
How many surplus people will be killed by human drivers today, tomorrow, next year, and next decade because of this suspension I wonder? No one ever seems to consider them in these decisions[0].
[0]I can see myself not agreeing with the conclusions, but to not even see the question broached in these terms is maddening.
I think there is also a consideration that should be made for traffic flow. Every time I see a report on these cars it's because they are clogging up a street or stopped dead in traffic. Of course no one reports when they are behaving well but at least if some asshole door dasher double parks and fouls traffic flow you can through persuasion or violence resolve the situation.
We -- in the US -- could cut our traffic-related death rate in half (or more!) by just doing whatever it is that most European countries [UK, German, Sweden, etc] do different from us.
The thing is we aren't doing those things. Maybe its because we don't want to, maybe its because we can't. My point is let's not add advanced robotics to the things we can't or won't do: There is a future where 40k automotive deaths/year becomes closer to 40 on the back of self-driving cars, but we can't get to that future[1] with the current level of risk tolerance.
[1]And getting there slower has the opportunity cost of surplus deaths at the current rate minus the terminal rate - a year delay to that future costs 39,960 lives. (A year delay to ubiquitous public transport does as well ofc.)
There is evidence that when a self driving car is stalled in the middle of the street no one can actually figure out what they are going to do from moment to moment. No driver to yell at, doesn't respond to honking... should I go open the door and hit some big 'call mothership' button on the dash...Or will it try and run me over...
This is the standard to which the builders of autonomous vehicles wish to be held. However, this is unlikely in my opinion. I believe instead they will be held to the more rigorous standard of "is there evidence that this is dangerous?"
Note for example today's suit against Meta for alleged harms against children. No such suit against TV aimed at children or e.g. fashion magazines that are well-known to have deleterious effects on children. Autonomous vehicles are new tech, so the bar will be higher.
I thought i just read that they were just allowed to put a lot more vehicles on the road, maybe because of a promise that they would be better but now we find that they are not?
I do not believe "it's as dangerous as a human driver" is a good reason to look past all the problems with self-driving cars. There should be a higher standard than that.
Let's not forget that the companies that develop and lobby for self driving cars do it for profit. Whatever safety qualities they may or may not have are there to deliver and maximize profit. At this point in time.
Public transport is a safer alternative but not as profitable
I completely agree that self-driving and electric cars aren't the answer but investing in public transport is. You won't get an argument out of me about that.
I'm not who you were originally replying to so I definitely didn't think you were implying thing about me (I also didn't think you were implying anything about the person you were replying to). I was just qualifying my opinion on the safer-than-a-human standard as a non-industry one.
Specious and reductive. It's qualitative, not quantitative. Even though the latter is easier for people to understand. We have decades of data about human-caused accidents. We know the ceiling is relatively stable. We know an additional 20% of drivers won't wake up tomorrow incompetent or drunk. Anything above zero is bad, but we know and accept the status quo.
But every new model or software update will invalidate what we've observed and know about automated driving.
We're in an era of extreme obfuscation and enshittification by tech companies, even where safety is involved. I'd be more likely to trust self driving tech if I trusted the current form of the tech industry, and trusted that regulatory bodies had the power and ability to oversee them as effectively as when they were first regulating cars.
Of course even that wasn't perfect, but my trust that we can even do that well is nonexistent.
“A human driver” is not the standard, not should it be. Humans need training, experience, physical dexterity, and motivation (and more besides) to be good drivers. If you average human drivers you include barely-competent teenagers, barely-dextrous old people, drunk people, etc.
“A highly-skilled and attentive human driver” is a reasonable standard. So-called autonomous vehicles are nowhere near that.
- Zero traffic fatalities would be nice
- Reduced congestion/traffic, people can get to places faster
- Never having to worry about parking again
- No more need for cars parked on streets, more space & safer for cyclists and pedestrians
- Reduced income requirements for those that need access to a car
There are countless benefits. The transition period to get there will be a little tumultuous, but we'll get there eventually as a society
They won't reduce congestion and traffic, because people won't have to drive they'll be OK with being on the road longer. You just hang out in your living room on wheels.
Parking... Where are the cars going to park exactly? How far from the restaurants and homes etc? Won't the extra trips from/to parking lots create more traffic?
Reduced income requirements, that's a new one to me. These cars will have more tech that's more expensive to build and maintain. How does that make them cheaper?
50%+ of car trips are less than three miles... as a society what we need is a way to make those trips without cars.
Traffic is a function of how many cars go through a road/intersection per unit time, which is reduced if cars keep shorter following distances, which self-driving cars can do because of faster reaction times.
In the extreme, imagine if a light turns green and all cars in line accelerate at the same time. Intersections would let through a lot more cars.
Or think of freeway speeds where the length of a car is near-negligible. A one-second following distance means almost 60 cars pass a given point in a minute, versus almost 30 cars per minute for a two-second following distance.
> They won't reduce congestion and traffic, because people won't have to drive they'll be OK with being on the road longer. You just hang out in your living room on wheels.
Traffic flows would become well coordinated and way more efficient, no more accordion effect and accidents to cause traffic jams.
> Parking... Where are the cars going to park exactly? How far from the restaurants and homes etc? Won't the extra trips from/to parking lots create more traffic?
It could be several miles from where the passengers are being dropped off. See above for why traffic won't be worse.
> Reduced income requirements, that's a new one to me. These cars will have more tech that's more expensive to build and maintain. How does that make them cheaper?
Of course new technology is expensive initially. Over time, it becomes cheaper and cheaper. Just like air travel, personal computers, broadband internet, etc.
> 50%+ of car trips are less than three miles... as a society what we need is a way to make those trips without cars.
More efficient use of the roadways from self driving cars would create opportunities for improvements in this area as well. Dedicated protected bike lanes, for example.
Besides what the other user pointed out, there are tens of millions of people driving an hour or more every day just to get to work, and that time sink might feel a bit more bearable if you could relax and do whatever you wanted during that time rather than focus on all the obstacles around you. I don't know that the state of self-driving vehicles will be quite there in my lifetime, but some time in the future they will be, if we keep making progress on them.
You might like driving. For many, driving is stressful.
This is besides the point someone else brought up about how notoriously bad at driving humans can be, and the capacity for how much safer an automated car could be when the tech is matured.
Public transit like efficient railroad infrastructure across the US would be even nicer, but I've about given up on that for the USA. They're doing self driving cars because we sunk too much money in roadway infrastructure (sunk cost fallacy.)
> that time sink might feel a bit more bearable if you could relax and do whatever you wanted during that time rather than focus on all the obstacles around you
We could use... trains & buses. Self-driving trains and buses!
But self-driving individual cars, because they will make the time more bearable, will induce even more driving, which is the opposite of what we want.
Oh, I completely agree. This is big tech solving a problem for humans, but ignoring a larger problem for humanity.
To give the benefit of the doubt, my assumption is that they're solving it this way because the road infrastructure and market for cars already exists. You'd see big tech working on automating public transit if states actually started improving their public transit infrastructure.
Better railroads would be a far better solution. But I think getting there will take a lot of convincing in America. So much money has gone into road infrastructure that I have to imagine there's a lot of sunk cost fallacy at play.
Oh certainly, sunk cost, the industries entirely dependent on cars, etc. But we regularly have to rebuild those roads anyways, and how much money is being thrown away trying to make cars less awful?
There's a rural cost/benefit that ensures we will never not need cars, probably. But I can't fathom why eight lane interstates exist. If we can justify that many lanes of road traffic, we can certainly replace six of them with a train.
Self-driving trains? Easy. And no matter how hard you try, even the most efficient electric car will never end up greener than a train on a per user basis.
The phenomenon of viewing public transit as somewhere that you'll be assaulted or robbed is an incredible indictment of the US. I don't know how true it is though.
Assaulted and robbed are the least of my worries. Its a small chance but its there. What I hate about public transit is the public part.
I've witnessed tons of anti-social behavior over the years taking the DC metro and honestly, have never been comfortable ever since I was a child and got stuck between two drunk men arguing after a baseball game. I was feeling claustrophobic and could even feel the spit hit my face. The car was packed and no room to really get away from it. I think its gotten better but I wouldn't know as I haven't used it in years.
People are swayed by anecdotes and dramatic headlines and politics and look for reasons to be afraid. People don't know how to measure risk in their day to day lives. It's an indictment of something, but not public transportation.
Meanwhile in reality:
- More traffic due to induced demand as sitting in traffic becomes comfortable
- Self-driving subscription in addition to all other car costs
- More car-centric infrastructure needed as we realize that self-driving cars can't be made fast and safe for mixed street use with pedestrians, bikes etc.
I highly doubt driverless cars will have an actually positive impact with regards to reducing traffic, nor that they can go uninsured, nor that they will be a cheap option for commuting.
They might be safer than human drivers, but there are already superior solutions to that in the form of transportation systems that are not overly focused on cars.
Something like 30,000 Americans alone are killed every year in car accidents. I think the primary idea is to reduce the constant death on the road by making machines that are safer at driving than humans. The toll that car accidents have on society is honestly unconscionable.
That is a good point. A secondary benefit, is a self driving car can literally give most workers that commute about an hour per day of their lives back. For some people it will be two to three hours.
How is being stuck in a small box for an hour "getting that hour back"? Most people don't want to read a book during their commute, they want to have less commute, so they can do actual things they want, like play with their kids or cook dinner or enjoy a movie in the comfort of their own home.
"Fixing" commutes by making everyone sit alone in their car while it does the driving part as if that's the problem with an hour long commute, is the single dumbest way to make cities better.
If your favorite hobby is sitting by yourself, strapped to a chair, sure, you get your time back. But the reason I'm allergic to commuting is that I prefer to spend time with my family.
If Americans were serious about reducing car deaths they'd ban gigantic pickups and SUVs with blind spots big enough to fit a Volkswagen. They'd ban cars from city centers and build bicycle highways. They'd invest in convenient rail infrastructure.
Instead we've got "it's a car but you can doomscroll while on your 45 minute commute and we harvest your data to sell ads".
I do not own a car. Love living in a transit forward city. But I understand the reality, that is not a real solution for most Americans who live in suburbs where good transit is just not possible due to the original layout. Instead of trying to shoehorn a solution that isn't practical we should focus on ones that potentially are.
Everybody says that transit isn't practical because suburbs exist. But nobody said that cars were impractical before suburbs existed (well probably some people did and it turns out they were right)
It's just so stereotypically American to say "here's a problem society faces" and then in the same breath pretend the solution is to enrich the CEOs of a handful of tech companies peddling solutions that may or may not even ever succeed.
>But they want freedom more.
Sure, it's a very individualistic society where one's personal convenience is more important than societal good. But let's call a spade a spade and not pretend that self driving car companies are selfless benefactors out to solve pedestrian deaths.
This industry is evil, and I can't fathom what kind of a market would exist for driverless cars. KITT is science fiction. In reality, human drivers are almost always going to be safer. I would never trust my life or those I care about to ride inside a computer-operated vehicle.
Those that do are making a costly mistake. Any robot-assisted car still requires a human driver to be paying attention to the road, but by definition, because the robot does most of the driving, the human failsafe is going lulled into a false sense of security, or bored by effectively driving without actually driving. They will slack, and when the critical moment of awareness from the human is needed, he will be caught off guard, as opposed to the actual human driver who was aware the entire time, because he always had to be.
More to the point, even if I had a 100% guarantee of safety, I would never want to have the joys of driving taken away from me in the first place! Driving is liberating. It's power. It's the freedom to go anywhere and do anything. It's, dare I say, cathartic.
And for those that are unable to drive, Uber & Lyft exist to fill in the gap. They are themselves a relatively new technology, just under a decade old, and you can always find a quick, affordable ride on demand to just about anywhere.
What gap in the market would a self-driving car even fulfill?
This is yet another example of the arrogance of big tech, pushing out unsafe and socially deleterious products in the hopes of a get rich quick scheme. It's no different to what social media did a decade ago or what "generative a.i." is doing now.
Today’s suspensions are based on the following:
13 CCR §228.20 (b) (6) – Based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation.
13 CCR §228.20 (b) (3) – The manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles.
13 CCR §227.42 (b) (5) – Any act or omission of the manufacturer or one of its agents, employees, contractors, or designees which the department finds makes the conduct of autonomous vehicle testing on public roads by the manufacturer an unreasonable risk to the public.
13 CCR §227.42 (c) – The department shall immediately suspend or revoke the Manufacturer’s Testing Permit or a Manufacturer’s Testing Permit – Driverless Vehicles if a manufacturer is engaging in a practice in such a manner that immediate suspension is required for the safety of persons on a public road.
Misrepresenting safety seems like a big deal.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-statement-o...
Edit: This Vice article [2] says Cruise tried to withhold pedestrian injury footage from the DMV.
> In the Order of Suspension, the California DMV said that the Cruise vehicle initially came to a hard stop and ran over the pedestrian. After coming to a complete stop, it then attempted to do a “pullover maneuver while the pedestrian was underneath the vehicle.” The car crawled along at 7 mph for about 20 feet, then came to a final stop. The pedestrian remained under the car the whole time.
> The day after the incident, DMV representatives met with Cruise to “discuss the incident.” During that meeting, Cruise only showed footage up to the first complete stop, according to the Order of Suspension. No one at Cruise told the officers or showed any footage of the subsequent pullover maneuver and dragging. The DMV only learned of that from “another government agency.” When DMV asked for footage of that part of the incident, Cruise provided it.
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ba3/california-dmv-suspen...