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S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

sfchronicle.com

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Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#11

Post by codampa01314 »

> In San Francisco, those problems can mean self-driving cars blocking traffic, transit and emergency responders, as well as erratic behavior resulting in close calls with cyclists, pedestrians or other vehicles.

I have mixed feelings about how to test self-driving vehicles (mostly stemming from ignorance). But at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not making progress on this (or very very slow progress)? And considering that "no one was hurt" and "driverless taxis have never killed or seriously injured anyone in the millions of miles they’ve traveled" are were now there?

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#13

Post by wholien »

carapace wrote: post #2

First, where is the data? Second, yeah, it's bananas to test large, fast, heavy robots on public streets. The only reason we let it happen is because the robots look like cars. Third, it's bananas to have large, fast, heavy vehicles everywhere mixed in with all the other traffic. The only reason we let it happen is a mass-marketing campaign (see "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://…

they are only allowed to run from 9pm to 5/6am though. Rode a few and they seemed perfectly safe.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#14

Post by DragonStrength »

I left SF a year ago but had Cruise and Waymo cars in my neighborhood constantly. They were a total nuisance. They'd jerk towards pedestrians in crosswalks leading to this uncomfortable standoff where no one in the neighborhood would ever step in front of one. I'd wager any stats here are way lower than real incidences as I was nearly hit multiple times and never got to the "report it" stage as there are so many barriers to doing so.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#16

Post by notakio »

parl_match wrote: post #3

I'm wary about using public roads to test these, but I think the way the data is presented is misleading. I'm not sure how it's misleading, but separating "incidents" into categories (safety, traffic, accident, etc) might be a good start. For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket. While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a safety issue at all. By the way, as a…

I moved out of SF ~2018, and only recently revisited, and the increased frequency with which I saw robocars was immediately concerning to me, largely based on the potential for things to go wrong, and with just how frequent they were.

My second thought was, after hearing friends and family still there echo nothing for disdain for them, "how long before someone starts setting these on fire?" as some sort of nuisance campaign against the things. Turns out, 1) you don't need fire, and 2) not that long, since the cone thing started happening about a week afterwards.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#17

Post by shtopointo »

Can anybody find the data set from which they created the graph?

I tried browsing https://data.sfgov.org/browse but there's nothing that immediately refers to "autonomous vehicles", "incidents" or the like...

(I'm trying to piece the data together for myself, and I'm a bit suspicious that their graph stops in April. I'd also want to cross reference to number of vehicles on the road, because if there's been a ramp up since e.g. January, you would expect more incidents to happen).

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#18

Post by slashdev »

codampa01314 wrote: post #11

> In San Francisco, those problems can mean self-driving cars blocking traffic, transit and emergency responders, as well as erratic behavior resulting in close calls with cyclists, pedestrians or other vehicles. I have mixed feelings about how to test self-driving vehicles (mostly stemming from ignorance). But at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigne…

Uber’s driverless vehicle killed someone jaywalking at night in another state. So you can’t say they’ve never killed anyone. Plus Teslas have killed their own occupants plenty of times.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#19

Post by somewhereoutth »

Given that in any high traffic environment driving is as much a social problem as anything else, it should be no surprise that anything short of Artificial General Intelligence cannot cope and causes disruption.

Considering how little progress has been made with AGI to date, perhaps it's time to call off the self driving experiment.

Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

#20

Post by ketralnis »

codampa01314 wrote: post #11

> In San Francisco, those problems can mean self-driving cars blocking traffic, transit and emergency responders, as well as erratic behavior resulting in close calls with cyclists, pedestrians or other vehicles. I have mixed feelings about how to test self-driving vehicles (mostly stemming from ignorance). But at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigne…

> at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not making progress on this

It's not my problem whether Waymo makes progress on their technology, but they make it my problem when they hit me with their car.

I do have sympathy for wanting to make the progress: we might make better pacemakers faster by testing out 20 designs on 20 people. But nobody wants to be the one that gets the one that doesn't work. And in this case the victims aren't even involved. They didn't opt-in to beta testing the road full of half-baked robots, they're just trying to get to work.

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