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

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

#211

Post by what-no-tests »

JoshTko wrote: post #84
imperialdrive wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google will optimize minimizing deaths/accidents vs maximizing trips/revenue. So it seems that buzzing closer to people is optimal for Google.

That's the "AI Alignment" problem we've heard so much about recently.

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

#212

Post by geraldwhen »

cashsterling wrote: post #206
throwaway9274 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely right. To situate in terms of recent events, there have been three stages of trying to delay / influence the California CPUC robotaxi expansion approval vote: 1. Tried a politician scare campaign. Failed because it was too transparent it was an attempted distraction from their terrible public safety record. 2. Tried coning and disabling the vehicles. Failed because it was too transparently astroturfed, leg…

I don't know why the other reply to this post got downvoted to hell. THe person has a point. Fully autonomous cars are cool... don't get me wrong. But electric cars and autonomous electric/gas cars are probably not the right solution to our person transport needs. using energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle to transport one or two 200 lb humans is not energy-efficient... most of the energy is spent just moving the vehicle…

My city doesn’t even have sidewalks. Bikes aren’t happening.

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

#213

Post by pessimizer »

hosh wrote: post #173
dekhn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

informal perceptions are about the last thing you want when making decisions about large-scale technology roll-outs. Instead, people should be informed with the highest quality data, and need to be reminded that informal perceptions are often biased and skewed.

A study of the formalism called Promise Theory will quickly show how that is not true. Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect informat…

> Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information.

There's going to have to be (or there may already be) a rule against accusing people of being ChatGPT, but I can't believe that this is an argument that the "imperfect information" that average people have about some condition or event is somehow more important than the actuality of the condition or event precisely because of how wrong average people can be?

Because voluntary cooperation? I should only be concerned with that if I'm doing PR work for these companies. It's their job to sell safety, the only thing I'm concerned with is when people are lying. Or intentionally confusing the public about some fact, polling the confused public about what they think the facts are, then reporting the poll to further confuse the fact in lieu of simply reporting the data.

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

#214

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #149
abeppu wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a key disconnect is that the 'incidents' being complained of most are not collisions, but they can still be disruptive, and indeed dangerous. Suppose one were to just install brightly painted immobile bollards on streets, and insist they were "driving" just very very slowly. They wouldn't hit anyone. They wouldn't kill anyone. They would piss everyone off. This disconnect is repeatedly part of where this conv…

I've certainly seen cases where self-driving cars behaved in a way that I would consider reckless if a human was at the wheel, but were not collisions, did not result in injury, and I expect will not form part of any statistics reported to any government body A few weeks ago I saw one blow a red light. Nobody hurt or killed, so it wasn't reported to any responsible agency. It might not have even been tallied by the c…

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by scarmig »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #180

> Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records Also, Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records. I'll believe the city officials in this case, since they actually have some data. The car companies just have hand waves.

> Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records.

This is not true. They monthly release accidents and disengagement reports to the state.

SF officials, on the other hand, have been caught more or less fabricating a story and misusing data. From the Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the process and AV companies are required to report all incidents to:

> Regarding collision responsibility, San Francisco’s analysis appears to omit or overlook relevant facts present in the data and collision narratives that are critical for understanding the context of the cited incidents. The examples of two injury collisions upon which it seems San Francisco bases its analysis of Waymo’s relative injury collision rate (included below in Appendix A as entries for June 2022 and July 2022) are problematic in this regard. According to Waymo’s account as submitted to NHTSA, the June 2022 collision does not appear to involve any contact with the Waymo AV. indicates the Waymo AV was rear-ended by another vehicle, which immediately left the scene. Note that no determination of fault, of the AV or otherwise, is evident through these reports.

(https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/K...)

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

#216

Post by yonran »

reaperducer wrote: post #149
abeppu wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a key disconnect is that the 'incidents' being complained of most are not collisions, but they can still be disruptive, and indeed dangerous. Suppose one were to just install brightly painted immobile bollards on streets, and insist they were "driving" just very very slowly. They wouldn't hit anyone. They wouldn't kill anyone. They would piss everyone off. This disconnect is repeatedly part of where this conv…

I've certainly seen cases where self-driving cars behaved in a way that I would consider reckless if a human was at the wheel, but were not collisions, did not result in injury, and I expect will not form part of any statistics reported to any government body A few weeks ago I saw one blow a red light. Nobody hurt or killed, so it wasn't reported to any responsible agency. It might not have even been tallied by the c…

Someone posted an example of a self-driving Cruise car that appeared to run a red light https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/14wyyzw/just_.... Although in that example, technically the self-driving car was guilty of entering the intersection without sufficient space on the other side, rather than of crossing the limit line while facing a red light.

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

#217

Post by mediumdeviation »

dekhn wrote: post #146
LispSporks22 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with ya normally, but literally a few paragraphs in they have the chart source: the TA, going from 3 to 91 "incidents" over a year. If you turn it on its side, it kinda looks like rocket blasting off.

That's not a rocket blasting off, it's a rocket failing to reach orbit by barely clearing the launch platform. More importantly: that chart isn't normalized by miles driven. As the companies have been ramping up, you'd expect (under a random model) that incidents would go up. It could also be explained by greater knowledge of SDCs, increased news coverage, and more awareness of how to report incidents. More important…

Per mile incident rate is a measure only the companies care about. Why wouldn't the city care about an increase in the total number of traffic incidents? Especially when the self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at the end of the day the roads are getting less safe.

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

#218

Post by sroussey »

II2II wrote: post #185
dekhn wrote: post #115

"Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as possible. When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents. Remember: reality is banal. Things are far bette…

The numbers they gave is more than a doubling, while they were quite clear about the limitations of their data. That includes not knowing how many AVs are on the road, which is something that the companies should be able to provide. Also look at the claims that AVs have not caused death or serious injury. (I noticed that they did not claim that AVs have not caused injury.) That is great, except I would not expect any…

In February they hit 1,000,000 miles cumulative for all previous years. Last week they hit 3,000,000 miles.

Cars kill about as many Americans as the Vietnam War, but every year. Aside from guns, I can't think of anything else so deadly that we give to our children as they enter adulthood.

It is common, it is not part of the news cycle. We care more about the unlikely terrorist. People are bad with numbers.

Personally, I think it would a huge ethics violation to not be running tests of autonomous cars (not talking Telsa toy driving stuff).

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

#219

Post by jrmg »

medellin wrote: post #154
paxys wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Depending where someone put a cone on my car i would possibly just run them over or drive off unsafely if i felt that it was an attempt to rob me or steal my car. Having things like that categorized differently makes sense because it’s caused by humans being dicks. But maybe you are right and that is the new reality we live in where none of us get to advance because of a small group of angry and stupid people.

Man, and further up this post there was someone talking about running over groups of cyclists if they maliciously surrounded their car.

Try to remain calm. You’re generally not allowed to just _murder_ people who attempt to inconvenience, detain, or rob you, even though they are ‘being dicks’. That’s not how crime is dealt with in a stable society. It’s not a ‘new reality’.

I really hope we’re not devolving into a place where more people think this way…

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

#220

Post by macintux »

cozzyd wrote: post #44
scarmig wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After creating a society where car ownership is a necessary prerequisite to success, it’s challenging to block people from participating.
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