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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.’

#41

Post by scarmig »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #30

>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 m…

Mean is the relevant metric, though. If it's only the bottom 10% of human drivers who cause all crashes and driverless cars are as safe as the 20p human driver, you can replace all human drivers with autonomous ones and eliminate all crashes.

That's to say nothing of the fact that driverless cars will improve from their current level, and the fact that companies operating them can be held liable for crashes and forced to account for their actions in a way that the worst human drivers cannot (which provides a strong incentive for them to improve).

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

#42

Post by martythemaniak »

Beware: the State sent a letter accusing the city of manipulating data in order to make AVs looks more dangerous than they were: https://twitter.com/annatonger/status/1673403230804385813

> In the 4 Waymo traffic collisions SF cited to prove driverless cars are less safe, 3 were the Waymos being rear-ended and 1 didn't even involve any cars touching, CA says. https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/K...

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

#43

Post by johnfn »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #30

>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 m…

Hmm, I think that, in fact, this comparison is disingenuous! If you want to reduce net collisions, you want to compare to the mean, not median. In that case, once you've produced a self-driving car that's better than the mean, you're saving lives. You don't need to create a self-driving car which is better than every driver, ever.

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

#44

Post by cozzyd »

scarmig wrote: post #41
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #30

>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 m…

Mean is the relevant metric, though. If it's only the bottom 10% of human drivers who cause all crashes and driverless cars are as safe as the 20p human driver, you can replace all human drivers with autonomous ones and eliminate all crashes. That's to say nothing of the fact that driverless cars will improve from their current level, and the fact that companies operating them can be held liable for crashes and force…

you can more easily prevent the bottom 10% from driving by more rigorous driving standards / more stringent revocation of licenses.

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

#45

Post by more_corn »

standardUser wrote: post #22
notakio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Uber performed self driving car tests in downtown San Francisco for a bit. I personally saw an error where self driving cars turning right on red failed to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk who had right of way.

It was a bug. The driver looped and tried again while I was standing there and it happened again. It was an incident. It was a safety incident. Getting killed by a robot breaking the rules is no less dead than if it were a human. And there’s no comfort in the thought that it might happen less often with a robot driving.

Your argument that human drivers suck commits the fallacy of whataboutism. Your argument that not all incidents are safety incidents is misleading.

There are safety incidents they’re unacceptable.

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

#46

Post by imperialdrive »

wordsarelies wrote: post #23

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 publi…

They are MUCH more aggressive now. It used to be that if you saw one, you could be 99% sure it would stop and wait for the path to be fully clear. Now, they will buzz right by you within a foot or two. Very alarming how quickly they progressed to being careless.

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

#47

Post by valine »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #30

>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 m…

Why does it require AGI? That's a bold, unsubstantiated claim. Let me make my own bold claim: Simple common sense reasoning is very close to being solved with our latest LLMs. You would need AGI if you wanted to replace the team developing your self-driving car. A decent LLM, with vision input that's been fine-tuned on driving scenarios, will be more than sufficient for Level 5 driving.

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

#48

Post by prpl »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #30

>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 m…

P75 would be nice

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

#50

Post by de_keyboard »

slashdev wrote: post #18
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.

Not disagreeing, but you might find it interesting to learn about the history of the term "jaywalking"
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