@garry did a rebuttal video to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc
Kind of cringe when he says "Municipal Transportation Association". Comes off like a guy who has probably never boarded a bus.
S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> A 60lb e-bike can also transport a 200 lb person whilst using far less resources (both to make the vehicle and to operate it) and space. E-bikes are great for the situations, climates, and people who can use them. E-bikes are not a substitute for the majority of people’s transportation needs. I think the young, healthy people who live in moderate climates with good weather, short commutes, and little need to haul a…
They work for the majority of people of all ages who live in cities where the infrastructure has been properly built to accommodate bikes.
Most people rarely need to haul anything and can use carshare when they do.
I've demoed a multistory house down to the bricks and re-built it from the outside in without a car.
Hired someone to haul off a dumpster several times.
For major materials deliveries, like beams or windows, usually it was the better part of a flatbed truck anyway, so I wasn't going to be doing that in a car. Most of the rest I did with a cargo bike. I only two or three times even bothered to use carshare (e.g. for a load of tiles) even though it's cheap.
I'm not at all proposing that professional builders work this way, but also a relatively small proportion of the population are professional builders. And doing it this way wasn't any kind of a drag for me.
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#263Earlier 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…
My take is that this isn't so much about privately owned cars and/or taxis, but the real politics is in over the road trucking, and these incremental steps are just part of that. If self driving over the road trucking happens (and that's sort of inevitable), politicians seem to legitimately believe it will collapse our economy. It seems like all self-driving anything gets lumped in with that.
Considering that the most popular job in the USA is "truck driver", they might have some clue about what the damage might be. Eventually they can retrain, but we are going to be throwing a whole generation out of work without a very good alternative.
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
During the height of Critical Mass, bicyclists would surround minivans and keep them from leaving. Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist. I don't expect self-driving cars to deal any better with cones, or any hostile action towards a car.
I've participated and watched critical mass any number of times. I've never seen cyclists target cars randomly. The only time you will be surrounded in a minivan is if you try to drive through the cyclists, or otherwise act aggressively or unsafely. Critical mass is a protest movement. If you drive your vehicle into the middle of a protest against vehicles in a way that puts people in danger, don't be surprised when…
The situtations I'm describing (covered in the press at the time) were not defensive- they were actively offensive.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicts_involving_Critical_M...
Swarming a car and preventing it from moving- sure, the safest thing for the car to do is stop driving, but... I don't think that's really a good defense of confrontational bikers.
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Anyone quoting "miles driven" is being disingenuous. How many of those miles were in the Bay Area plus Arizona?
How does the location have anything to do with the total number of miles driven?
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#266I've just got to say I'm so impressed with both Waymo and Cruise. Last year they did 4.5 million miles put together in California with zero fatalities. This is an incredible achievement.
The US rate is 0.57 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles.
The national average rate has a denominator that is bloated up with easy freeway miles. Cruise and Waymo never leave SF city streets.
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> A 60lb e-bike can also transport a 200 lb person whilst using far less resources (both to make the vehicle and to operate it) and space. E-bikes are great for the situations, climates, and people who can use them. E-bikes are not a substitute for the majority of people’s transportation needs. I think the young, healthy people who live in moderate climates with good weather, short commutes, and little need to haul a…
Cargo bikes are a thing. It's also why we have ebike so we don't have to be hyper fit.
The need to haul weekly grocery is greatly reduced with proper urban planning like corner stores and walkable streets.
Bad weather can be mitigated through proper clothing. In Finland, people ride their bikes through the winter.
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
none of this reporting can be trusted from the chronicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
This isn’t an example of shooting the messenger because you dislike the message. The SF Chronicle just has a track record of anti SF bias, then turning around and complaining about the effects of their own reporting https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/sf-downtown-doom-l...
It’s sadly not a trustworthy source on these matters
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pl…
Equally we seem to be devolving to a place where more people think doing things like this is ok. The solution isn’t to run them over - your advice to remain calm is good. But we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic. Prison and life altering fines are a first step. This will absolutely deter this type of behavior.
You want life-altering fines and prison for inconveniencing cars? Do you think the US judicial system is at all capable of applying this fairly? That law would exist for a day before someone deemed "undesirable" is arrested for not getting across the street faster than the crosswalk signal.
Mental breakdown in the street? Jail Cyclist riding in a way the cops don't like? Jail Grandma can't get her wheelchair up the curb ramp? Jail
Re: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
#270Earlier 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,…
That's not really true. They now do drive the entirety of San Francisco, 24/7, in all weather conditions. I think it's a pretty apples to apples comparison.
The one point where I agree is there aren't as many of them as there are human cars, and it's possible that in large numbers there could be some unintended consequences. Think 1000 of them getting stuck at the same location. There should be provisions limiting how fast they can scale up to make sure that doesn't happen.