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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

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Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#171

Post by nradov »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #51
numpad0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transportations and walking don’t replace a lot of use cases for cars, except for commuting for office works. You can’t board a train while soaked in mud, or pushing a Subaru seat, or carrying bag full of groceries. Actually I’ve done the latter two, but I haven’t seen anyone else doing it, and it had been extremely awkward. Everyone feels driving cars are wrong, perhaps because of emissions, but trains and bu…

we only have bags full of groceries because zoning prohibits grocery stores being near where people live in most place. So you need a car and since its a pain, you migt as well stock up on as much as you can while you're at it. If it were, you'd probably just go on a 10 minute walk and pickup enough for two days of food.

That's fine for young childless people. For families with multiple children it's a huge hassle to have to have to shop like that. Growing kids eat a lot. And when you buy heavy items like watermelon or milk or whole frozen chickens it's just not easy to carry. Much easier to drive a big car to a big box store and stock up on everything needed for a week.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#172

Post by TaylorAlexander »

mh- wrote: post #167
Natsu wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this make me wonder if something is going on with GPS due to the war in Ukraine?

EDIT: the following is incorrect per a reply below. Will leave the original comment below. --- That was going to be my hypothesis. GPS resolution can be reduced in a conflict area. I'll defer to someone with actual knowledge to add more info. :)

I believe the government promised not to ever reduce GPS resolution some 15 years ago, and new satellites supposedly do not even have the ability to do so.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#173

Post by astrange »

robbrown451 wrote: post #76
Barrin92 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but to get away from that you need gradual steps Given that you bring up the space program in the same post I'll stick with the metaphor and point out that you can't go to the moon by climbing up trees, or as Russ Ackoff said, doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong, because making the wrong thing more efficient just makes things worse. If you want fully automated, efficient transport t…

Trains and subways don't get you from anywhere to anywhere. They are incredibly expensive and take many years to add new lines, disrupting all kinds of things in the meantime. And they often take way longer to get you places. My time has value. There's a million things I'd rather be doing than waiting for a train, or waiting while a train makes tons of stops along the way that a car wouldn't. And are you expecting me…

The thing you want is micromobility (ebikes and scooters). A car isn't a good way to get groceries, it's a money pit that makes you out of shape while also being entirely capable of killing you or someone else's children. It's designed for the highway and not good for anything slower than that.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#174

Post by mbil »

paulpauper wrote: post #109

It's amazing how driverless taxies are a reality now . It shows how there is progress being made as much as there is talk about stagnation.

I rode in one recently. It was pretty smooth. An interesting thing: the car slowed to a stop in the middle of the street, and I couldn't immediately tell why.

There was a row of parked cars on the roadside, and a person was walking around one of them to open her trunk. I guess the car was able to spot her in the dark and opted to pause. So we were stopped there. The woman threw her hands up as if to say, "whatcha lookin' at?" I had the window down, and I offered the explanation "self-driving car." She said "Ugh, I hate those things." Then the car continued on.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#175

Post by astrange »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #104
Akronymus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love going directly from point A to B in a private space and I'm not ashamed to admit it. This provides value to my life in the form of comfort and convenience, factors that are so frequently waved away as irrelevant by anyone screaming "car culture". Its not irrelevant. But driving becomes better the less people are taking cars. So, even for people who would never take public transport or something like that, it…

I was a spoiled programmer working for Apple in the Bay Area when they (following Google's lead) offered buses for employees. For several years (until Covid) I took the bus back and forth to work every day. So awesome.

I always got motion sick on those things.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#176

Post by nradov »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #86
xyst wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am more annoyed at this country's car centric transportation culture than the ride share drivers blocking the bike lane. taxis do this all the time before "ride sharing" was a thing.

Taxis in my city are exempted from temporarily blocking bike lanes to unload or load passengers. There was (and still isn't) such an exception for TNCs, so them doing it is illegal. The number of taxis is also capped (medallions), so the number of taxis in bike lanes was limited. Then TNCs came along, and the number of taxi-like trips exploded, and suddenly there are far, far more drivers blocking bike lanes. Furherm…

Your city is unusual. In most cities the taxis were shit, and the city governments didn't care.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#177

Post by astrange »

quartesixte wrote: post #40
asdff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the market is not worth existing if it harms the planet. And most cities were actually designed for streetcar lines in the U.S., that includes all the big ones in California too. We just need to reengage that, and do simple things like give the existing bus networks signal preemption and their own lanes. Plus considering most car trips are under 5 miles and california has good weather, it makes no sense why…

Streetcars would be an amazing God send to LA. Would love to have them back.

Those largely died out because they were run by private operators, but the government then decided to make them cheaper by imposing price controls, and then didn't "nationalize" them when they ran out of business and died.

(The common story is they were bought up and shut down by car companies, but that's a myth afaik.)

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#179

Post by astrange »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #14
xyst wrote: post #10

all of this time and money wasted on driverless cars has been a complete failure. companies and cities should be investing their time into improving public transportation and designing our cities to be more walkable and make alternate modes of transportation more feasible. the US culture of using a car for everyday transportation is fucking insane, wasteful, and contributes to the rising cost of living across the US…

Cities cannot easily be "redesigned". Infrastructure exists and you can't just refactor neighborhoods like software. Autonomous vehicles are an enormous market and well worth the investment.

Dutch cities looked a lot more like American cities pretty recently, and American cities were full of smog pretty recently too. You can change a lot in a decade or three.

Re: Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

#180

Post by astrange »

sosodev wrote: post #159
johndfsgdgdfg wrote: post #129

Why Google is allowed to run a robotaxi service in megacity is beyond me. Google invades its users privacy and keeps users hostages for money. What can one expect from a company like Google when it runs a service in physical world? Something very harmful to humanity.

These are not owned nor operated by Google..

Google is running a robotaxi service in SF though. Just not that one.

Surprisingly I always see them testing in Los Altos. Surely that place has the most rich busybodys of all, and yet they haven't been sued for causing traffic or something.

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