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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.’

#21

Post by laweijfmvo »

DragonStrength wrote: post #14

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 barr…

I have similar experiences (as a pedestrian) crossing in front of Cruise cars, especially at 4-way stops when there aren't crosswalks explicitly drawn. It's odd because the cars are generally excruciatingly cautious, but for some reason as I'm crossing they seem to calculate exactly how fast they can take off such that they pass me right as I'm clear of their path -- whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the sidewalk before passing.

What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up? But also, given that they have all those cameras, I wouldn't dare do anything "unusual" like that because it'd probably run me over and say it was my fault, and here's the proof.

I don't doubt the cars' ability to calculate it exactly, but it's a different experience for sure.

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

#22

Post by standardUser »

notakio wrote: post #16
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 c…

I know this is a tired argument, but it's not wrong: There is equal or greater cause for concern with cars driven by people, we're just used to those horrors and reluctant to trade them for a different set of horrors, even if they are conclusively less horrible.

I lived carless in downtown SF for 10 years, usually with a walking commute, and it was not pleasant. Packed streets full of angry, stressed drivers honking and swerving and practically revving their engines as lights change so they can gun it past cyclists and pedestrians down the next narrow street. Anyone trying to replace these agro drivers with marginally-safer robots has my support.

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

#23

Post by wordsarelies »

So it's funny, when they first started rolling these out folks were interested, intrigued even. Folks walking would give them deference, mostly not run in front of them if they saw them, very unlike how they treat regular drivers. But now folks are getting sick of them.

So they were modeling all their behavior and driving around cooperative pedestrians and cars (mostly) now they have to model for an adversarial public.

Good fucking luck.

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

#25

Post by gonehome »

jconley wrote: post #12

@garry did a rebuttal video to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc

Yeah - none of this reporting can be trusted from the chronicle, the SF politics are crazy and there’s a lot of bullshit/bad-faith.

I hope cruise overcomes this and the people putting traffic comes and such on the cars are stopped.

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

#26

Post by lucisferre »

jconley wrote: post #12

@garry did a rebuttal video to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc

While I was skeptical about this video and the tone it opens up with did nothing to help with that, it is actually worth a watch.

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

#28

Post by crote »

peterisza wrote: post #8
peterisza wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are training and not testing. I might be wrong, but if I am right, the use of public roads is a necessity. This is how AI works, I guess.

Anyone care to explain why they downvoted this?

Probably because "training" implies direct and constant supervision, which would almost completely avoid any chance of incidents because the human is in charge at all times.

Deploying an unsupervised robot on the general public for training purposes is even worse than for testing purposes.

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

#30

Post by MontyCarloHall »

>Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit.

This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the mean human incident rate.

Today's self-driving cars may be safer than the mean human driver, but I would wager they are far from the median human driver, and absolutely nowhere close to the top 10% of human drivers. It may be possible (but very difficult) to beat the median human with dramatic improvements to current self-driving algorithms, but beating the top 10% of human drivers will require AGI.

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