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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.’

#91

Post by pawelmurias »

jarjoura wrote: post #75

Laws are written and designed for humans who constantly try to push it to the limit and get away with things. These cars are all over the place and I've been caught stuck on a street in Bernal Heights because it couldn't quite fit and just froze in place. I had to back out of the street because there wasn't any room for me to go around it. Yes it may be following laws to the letter, but not only was I grumpy about ha…

We can drive people and goods around without having a human waste his time driving stuff around. Not wasting money paying people to do stupid stuff is gigantic gain.

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

#92

Post by paxys »

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…

> For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket

And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day situations, not just the happy path. It seems like almost every day I run into some Cruise or Waymo (mostly Cruise) vehicle stuck in the middle of the street blocking traffic, and that should not be excused as "oh it's just learning".

Self driving car companies love to release reports comparing themselves against regular drivers when it comes to collisions and deaths, but conveniently skip over every other aspect of driving. The way things are today, if we continue to release more and more of them into San Francisco it will basically lead up to a total traffic deadlock, and yet people will still keep repeating "oh but they kill 0.1 fewer people per million miles so it's an improvement".

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

#93

Post by waldohatesyou »

jarjoura wrote: post #75

Laws are written and designed for humans who constantly try to push it to the limit and get away with things. These cars are all over the place and I've been caught stuck on a street in Bernal Heights because it couldn't quite fit and just froze in place. I had to back out of the street because there wasn't any room for me to go around it. Yes it may be following laws to the letter, but not only was I grumpy about ha…

Isn’t the gain that those folks can find another job that’s more useful?

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

#94

Post by Eisenstein »

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…

Depending on driverless taxis instead of having emotional people who need parking all the time seems to be a win, as long as they are safe and someone is held accountable when they mess up.

I am very unwilling to change 'people are flawed but (mostly) held accountable' to 'a corporation owned robot car ran someone over because of a software glitch and it is nobody's fault'. The problems with 'oops we got hacked or lost your data or locked you out of a service or deprecated a product because we spend no money on things that are not income generating' can not be passed on to such a system.

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

#95

Post by tick_tock_tick »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #24

What seems odd to me is that hardly anyone in SF seems to want them there (citizens, officials) yet it keeps getting pushed through?

Everyone I know in SF is excited it's really only the officials and some news stories. The wait list to join the App is crazy long demand outpaces the number of cars they have on the road. You're just seeing a very skewed narrative.

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

#96

Post by paxys »

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…

They also conveniently ignore everything except collisions. For example number of traffic jams caused because your car got confused and decided to stop in the middle of the street.

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

#97

Post by ketralnis »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #36
ketralnis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 want…

In the interest of having a discussion, let's assume that AVs are a meaningful goal to work towards for whatever reason. But given that, how do we get vehicles from the drawing board to actually being viable products without on-road testing? I've never seen a complex product that went from non-existent to perfect in the first deployment, so it doesn't seem realistic to expect that here. Instead, they should be develo…

Sadly, I come only with problems and not solutions. I take it as axiomatic that beta-testing with peoples' lives that didn't agree to do so is unacceptable. That closes off a lot of the solution space that you're proposing. That sucks and you're free to disagree but again I take it ethically unassailable.

Teleportation would also be a societal game changer but if the only way there is to beta test it on unwilling participants I'd also believe that, well, we just don't get teleportation then.

It's up to Waymo to figure out how to get there, not to me. I do not take it as axiomatic that just because it'd be useful that the ends justify the means. And it certainly isn't up to Waymo whether you or I can be sacrificed.

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

#99

Post by bhuga »

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…

I hadn't heard this statistic:

> since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents

It's tough to find anything relevant on DDG or google, they come up with information about racial disparities in traffic stops...can you link anything to read about this?

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

#100

Post by hadlock »

Barrin92 wrote: post #87
standardUser wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>There is equal or greater cause for concern with cars driven by people No there isn't. Driverless cars drive under a fraction of the conditions and in self selected locations precisely because the tech is still shoddy. Not to mention they only function at all because they're vastly outnumbered by humans who know how to respond to them. Let's do an actual experiment to compare. 100% driverless cars with current tech,…

Given the millions of miles driven since the start and a single pedestrian death in 2018, I would hesitate to call the tech shoddy. SF alone has 20-30 pedestrian deaths per year despite their well funded and almost completely ineffectual "vision zero" program. If there's been a second pedestrian fatality since I can't find it online.
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