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Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

blog.waymo.com

231–240 of 520 posts

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#231
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hopefully not-too-annoying reminder that this isn’t a future that is sustainable or desirable to live in compared with alternatives. It’s really just better than the automotive hellscape you are used to. Phoenix is one of the most car-centric places to live in the country. The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning. Car-focused infrastructure is incr…

What you’re saying is probably true, but are you proposing razing Phoenix and rebuilding it as a less car-focused place? My sense is that that proposal wouldn’t be too popular with the people whose homes you’re tearing down, nor would necessarily the change in lifestyle they would be forced to undergo (after I’m sure what would be decades of rebuilding…).

There are more compelling reasons to not have cities in the desert.

If water sources dry up it won't be necessary to raze the city. People will leave anyway.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#232
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baby steps makes sense, but you gotta admit Phoenix has to be thr easiest metro area to test with: Little inclement weather, little terrain change, newer infrastructure, streets mostly laid out in an east-west, north-south grid with consistent naming and numbering.

Waymo and Cruise have also been operating in San Francisco for a while, which is quite the opposite.

Hard mode would be anywhere that has snow.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#233
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good public mass transit is absolutely superior. Waymo cars don't solve traffic, it only partly solves parking and paying a human. Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.

Most buses off rush hour are sparsely populated. Look up actual energy efficiency of American mass transit systems per rider mile. https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html Re traffic: with robot-driven cars, congestion pricing would be technically easy. This is an example of not considering possibilities created by the new tech.

You are comparing with the least efficient form of transit, and looking at cities that are not really designed for transit anyway. So yes, bad transit in cities not designed for it isn't that efficient. Note, on top of this, that you are purely looking at energy efficiency, when the key problem of individual robotaxis is space efficiency.

Realistically, what breaks efficiencies in the US is city design: Places of work mostly detached from activities and housing, pretty much guaranteeing inefficiency. The robotaxis don't make a difference here: The max number of people looking to travel at once doesn't change, and neither does their destination. This makes the number of vehicles actually on the road not change very much at all: The best you can do is hope for people being comfortable (and not inconvenienced) by carpooling with strangers, not unlike what lyft and uber offer already. In the middle of the day, there's no new demand for robotaxis: They'd be parked somewhere, and every mile they move is a car/mile of congestion they create. So you either park the cars where the jobs are, getting, in practice, the same results as private vehicles, or you park them somewhere else, increasing total congestion. It's not just robotaxis that would park: See what happens in all the train commuter lines in American cities, where most trains just get parked in a yard.

The miracle of cities with top transit (See, for instance, Madrid), is that a relatively high percentage of the network is about equally busy in both directions. Trains might stop in rush hour, but route 6 will be useful in either direction most of the time, with little waste compared to US cities. This is the real weakness of the argument of just adding more transit: What we need to make it work is basically urban rebuilds. IMO still a good idea, bit it's a far slower, and more expensive problem than it might appear.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#235
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo and Cruise have also been operating in San Francisco for a while, which is quite the opposite.

Hard mode would be anywhere that has snow.

That's probably the hardest problem. But I think you severely underestimate just how hard getting it to work in a place like SF (in rain and fog) is. To get to where they are is a serious accomplishment.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what happens when a police officer tries to pull one over.

I'm curious as well...are there any protocols in place for emergency services or police interactions?

Yes, there were some news stories about the challenges that public safety and law enforcement had when dealing with Cruise vehicles. The company sent training materials, but that’s as much as I can remember at the moment, I’m sure some searching would pull up hits.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#237
post #137
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here (downtown Phoenix area) -- the driverless Waymos have been awesome. Occasionally they get confused but it seems pretty rare. They're better than a lot of the other drivers on the road out here. I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impo…

It blows my mind that someone living downtown in a city the size of Phoenix (relatively large) needs to use a car at all. It’s really a shameful failure of urban planning.

It’s not a failure when they achieved their goal. Phoenix and the greater metro is a city for cars.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate and the air quality. Counterpoint: no, they wouldn't. Moving towards self-driving automobiles merely props up an inefficient mode of transportation. Imagine sinking all that money that's being blown on self-driving cars into pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. The problem with cars is cars, not drivers.

> Imagine sinking all that money that's being blown on self-driving cars into pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure This does jack squat for getting across San Francisco or from corner to corner of Phoenix.

Phoenix has some really awesome bicycle paths, like along the ancient canal system. I was able to ride my bicycle home after a concert in Glendale to Tempe. It took hours and hours, but the weather was fine and conditions were favorable.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A formative experience when I was learning to drive was being pulled over to the right and watching a firetruck pull behind a car stopped at a red light, siren blaring and lights flashing, and eventually having to get on the PA and tell the person to run the red light so they could get through.

That's a mistake by the fire truck. You aren't supposed to preemptively run a red light to help them, they're supposed to order you to do it right away if that's what they want.

This surprised me, and I haven’t found any information one way or the other about the universality of the rule, but I did find this guide that strongly implies you’re correct.

https://www.firerescue1.com/fire-truck-crash/articles/stop-f...

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#240

Really love what waymo have been achieving with a relatively small team, but more importantly, they’ve had their heads down working and solving hard problems instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises (e.g. delivering robotaxies that make you $30k/yr by next year!), getting into ideological (sensor) wars, etc. (How many people know the name of their CEO? An…

> relatively small team 2,800 employees on Linkedin > instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0] Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV indu…

2,800 employees is small, when you consider what they are trying to accomplish.

Tesla has 130k.

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