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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#651

Post by fragmede »

tdeck wrote: post #584
Lammy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wouldn’t that generally increase traffic and conflicts? When coupled to our additional refusal to build housing, sadly, yeah. What two things do people usually commute between?

So just to clarify, you're thinking that traffic would increase because people would live outside SF and commute in? But don't people who live in SF need to get to work too? In that case, it seems like having giant highways carving up the city is going to make walking / biking to work harder which would cause more people to drive to work. That's what we see in "car-oriented" cities and it leads to an increase in traf…

Commute through, eg Mill Valley to South San Francisco, or similar. Right now, because there's no freeway that goes through the city, that commute is technically possible, I'm sure there are people that do that, but it's not a fun or easy commute, so people try and live in San Francisco and commute to one or the other. If there was a freeway from the Golden Gate bridge, through the city, instead of Lombard and then Gough, then the Mill Valley - South San Francisco commute would be (more) viable at a cost of increased inter-city traffic. Ie traffic that is in San Francisco, but not doing anything there other than transiting. Which is the so-called "extra" traffic GP refers to.

See also: Boston's Big Dig.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#652

Post by detaro »

dougmwne wrote: post #448
thereare5lights wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty high if people won't use them because they don't trust them.

If you think governments can't simply legislate away people's freedom to drive in the service of corporate profits or what's "best for them", you haven't read the news lately.

At least here in Germany, even "let's maybe have a speed limit on all the Autobahns" is highly contested. (And one half-joking suggestion has been to introduce a speed limit only for ICE cars as a motivation to go electric)

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#653

Post by addandsubtract »

sandworm101 wrote: post #558
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. How do you know board members aren't already using Waymo product heavily? It still doesn't mean they can go straight from board members using Waymo without backup drivers to arbitrary customers using Waymo without backup drivers.

Because if they did then they would surely tout that fact at every oppertunity. Musk doesnt drive a ferarri to work. He drives a tesla to promote his company's product line.

Elon takes a private jet to work.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#654

Post by liamwire »

sandworm101 wrote: post #564
atourgates wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in north-central Idaho. 10 minutes from 2 state-universities, but in an otherwise relatively rural part of the county with a 1/4 mile long, somewhat steep driveway. Every year, I'm amazed at how quickly our personal "veneer of civilization" collapses in the snow. The prior owners of our home would just keep their kids home from school, and work from home an average of "about a week every winter." We're a littl…

Northern Canada here. We have all been down that road. I had a rental once that wouldn't let me backup as the sensor was frozen over. I doubt AI will ever handle winter situations without help.

> I doubt AI will ever handle winter situations without help.

Sure it will, at least eventually. However, I suspect the humans at the time won’t like the answer: that it’s not always safe to drive in these conditions, and then the car refusing to drive autonomously, even if it is technically capable of navigating the route. It may deem the risk of getting stuck, etc. to be too high. Or you may need to accept a report to your insurance company that you’ve opted to override the safety warnings, etc.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#655

Post by liamwire »

raldi wrote: post #312
VelkaMorava wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

The computer doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be better than a human.

Adding to this to really drive the point home: it doesn’t even need to be better than a human that’s good at driving. It only needs to be better than the average human driver. Anecdotally speaking, that’s not such a high bar to pass (relative to the topic at hand).

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#656

Post by jobigoud »

liamwire wrote: post #655
raldi wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The computer doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be better than a human.

Adding to this to really drive the point home: it doesn’t even need to be better than a human that’s good at driving. It only needs to be better than the average human driver. Anecdotally speaking, that’s not such a high bar to pass (relative to the topic at hand).

For general acceptance I think it has to be better than how good the average human thinks they are at driving.

Secondly, its dumbest errors have to be better than what the average human thinks their dumbest errors would be. If there is an accident and every one thinks they would never have made this error, it will crush the acceptance.

Looking at the general accidents stats and saying to people that, on average there are less deaths on the road but they might die in a stupid accident they would never have been into, had they been driving themselves, will be a very hard pill to swallow. Most people prefer to have the illusion of control even if statistically it means worse expectations.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#657

Post by jacquesm »

paganel wrote: post #227
VelkaMorava wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

Or an ambulance going on the opposite direction (because that’s the only available choice) on a boulevard in a busy capital city like Bucharest. Saw that a couple of hours ago, the ambulance met a taxi which was going the right way but of course that the taxi had to stop and find a way for the ambulance to pass (by partly going on the sidewalk). I said to myself that unless we get to AGI there’s no way for an “autono…

Oh you can have that in Bucharest even with regular cars. Lanes are pretty fluid there, as is the preferred direction of travel, I've lived there for only two years and I've seen more vehicles go in the opposite direction ('ghost riders' we call them here) than anywhere else over the rest of my life. Romanian traffic is super dangerous, especially if you are a pedestrian and you can just about forget cycling in traffic. It is also the only place where a car behind me honked to get me to move over when I was walking on the sidewalk.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#658

Post by jacquesm »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #642
michaelt wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People at Tesla and other autonomous driving companies, of course are aware and worry about such situations. Yeah, a Tesla couldn't possibly drive into a stationary, clearly visible fire engine or concrete barrier, on a dry day, in direct sunlight.

As awful of a failure as that is, and as fun as it is to mock Tesla for it, that claim was that they're aware of edge cases and working on fixing them, not that they're already fixed. So your criticism doesn't really make sense.

A system dealing with 'edge cases' by special casing them is not going to work for driving, driving is a continuous string of edge cases, and if you approach the problem that way you fix one problem but create the next.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#659

Post by jacquesm »

njarboe wrote: post #598
michaelt wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People at Tesla and other autonomous driving companies, of course are aware and worry about such situations. Yeah, a Tesla couldn't possibly drive into a stationary, clearly visible fire engine or concrete barrier, on a dry day, in direct sunlight.

If you never fail, you aren't moving fast enough. A million people are killed globally each year by motor vehicles. Staggering amounts of pain and injuries. Massive amounts of property damage. Tesla's cars are not supposed to be left to drive themselves. The chance to save so much carnage seems worth letting some people driving Tesla's, that fail to pay attention to the road, suffer the consequences of poor decisions…

> If you never fail, you aren't moving fast enough.

Start-up religion doesn't really work when there are lives on the line. That's fine for your social media platform du jour but please don't bring that attitude to anything that has 'mission critical' in the description. That includes medicine, finance, machine control, traffic automation, utilities and so on.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#660

Post by bkor »

TillE wrote: post #459
zimprop wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations I always find it interesting that the further down the road of self-driving we go the more it seems like its a techy version of a known but morre low tech paradigm. This if taken without the self driving part just sounds like a bus lane with bus stops. In fact the driving of a car would be…

The optimistic vision of self-driving vehicles is as a publicly run transit system, where you have a fleet of automated vehicles of varying sizes able to dynamically, collectively route based on demand. A hyper efficient, fully electric bus system. That would be a pretty exciting development even in, eg, European cities with decent public transit.

> A hyper efficient, fully electric bus system.

Cars aren't efficient. The zoning should be such that things are close by enough. Then with proper cycling infrastructure you can just go by bike. As a result you'll need way less road. As cycling infrastructure is cheap and road maintenance is costly, it'll reduce expenses for e.g. cities.

> European cities with decent public transit.

I'd rather have the mix of public transport, bicycles and roads. Combined with proper zoning. Loads of electric cars just increases demand for a highly inefficient transportation method.

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