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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.’

#341

Post by dekhn »

saalweachter wrote: post #337
dekhn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans drove 3.2 trillion miles in 2021 and 42,795 people died in traffic fatalities (both values are estimates, and likely do not include every single mile driven or fatality that occurred, depending on how you prefer to count). So humans drive average of 74 million miles before a person gets killed, and Waymo's driven somewhere above 20M miles but probably fewer than 74M. At this point, I'd expect no self-drivin…

Your statistic (vehicle miles versus passenger miles) is probably more relevant, but now I'm curious whether the passenger miles of driverless vehicles are more or less than the vehicle miles, in aggregate. (Although maybe passenger miles is the correct metric -- a driverless, passengerless vehicle could hypothetically plow into an overpass at a speed that would result in a fatality, if anyone were inside; since the…

I think the latter number is all traffic-related fatalities (passengers, drivers, and peds/cyclists), not just passengers.

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

#342

Post by parl_match »

paxys wrote: post #92
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 a…

> And why would that not be a valid data point?

It is, I didn't say it wasn't. It's also not really in the same class as an accident with injury.

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

#343

Post by kelnos »

brigade wrote: post #112
paxys wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you do if you were stopped at an intersection and someone put a traffic cone in front of you? Sit there for the rest of your life blocking everyone behind you, or move it/drive around it? Same for literally every example that deviates from the happy path, no matter how minor. Construction work, something fallen on the road, a delivery van stopped on the side, temporary street closures. These cars are nowhe…

They put the cone on the hood, it's not an obstacle on the road. The car could try to shake it off, maybe, but is shaking it into the middle of the street and creating an obstacle really the right move? Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm capable of moving a traffic cone from a car surface to the sidewalk to handle this specific situation? Also the anti-car activists can easily move on to a wid…

> Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm

That does raise the question of what kinds of adverse situations an AV should have specialized hardware or software to handle. Maybe they should have a robotic arm! I dunno, probably not, but maybe!

A less silly example might be if the car breaks down. When a human driver is in the car, they can put the car in neutral, get out, and push it to the side of the road, out of the way of traffic. An AV will just sit there, blocking traffic, until a tow truck can arrive (which in most places can take 45 minutes or more). Granted, in this case, I don't think there is anything an AV can do. But I think these sorts of things are worth thinking about.

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

#344

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #92
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 a…

[deleted]

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

#345

Post by briandear »

sitkack wrote: post #301
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and little need to haul anything often forget The dutch created the cargo bike for this very reason. But they have the climate and biking infrastructure to support that kind of lifestyle. We (Americans) don't, I wish we did.

And that is a new thing, they paved the canals are going down the route America did and reversed it. America got conned into a car, suburbia, new construction scam that benefited a small number of rich people. A bike lane is a street you don’t let cars drive on.

I love My car. Glad I don’t have to wait in the boiling hot weather for a streetcar going to wherever the streetcar goes. Especially these days when many US cities are cesspools of crime, addiction, and homelessness.

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

#346

Post by dventimi »

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…

Personally, I believe our transport needs present many problems, with many factors, requiring many solutions. I wouldn't expect any one thing to be "the right solution." Autonomous vehicles offer productivity gains, safety gains, and even energy efficiency gains. If that's all they do, personally I regard that as progress.

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

#347

Post by evandale »

kelnos wrote: post #260
jeffbee wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city assigned a guy to go around and document every time an AV does something. That's why the "skyrocketing". They didn't count them before and now they do. If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all driver stupidity it would a significantly different report.

> The city assigned a guy to go around and document every time an AV does something Want to provide a citation to back that up? > They didn't count them before and now they do. They've apparently been counting since spring of 2022; the large increase in incidents started a year later. > If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all driver stupidity it would a significantly different report. Lovely dose of whatab…

> That also raises another point: as an example, we know that some drivers text while driving. Not all drivers do this; hopefully it's a minority.

I would be surprised if it was a minority. I am an extremely active pedestrian and cyclist in Toronto and if you pay attention to people in their cars stopped at red lights you'll find a majority will be glancing down at something. It could be a phone.. could be the radio.. could be something on their dash panel.. but when you start noticing how many people react to green lights based on hearing the car in front of them go rather than their sight (because their head is down) it doesn't make me optimistic that they're looking at anything other than their phone.

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

#348

Post by naniwaduni »

m00x wrote: post #188
medellin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While it is an incredibly shitty thing to do, that does not give you the right to murder someone.

Putting large vision-blocking objects on people's cars while they're using it is absolutely in the class of things that will get people killed entirely gratuitously, and while I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's right to kill the perpetrator, they certainly have no right to complain if happen not to survive the encounter.

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

#349

Post by minwcnt5 »

__loam wrote: post #135
HWR_14 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I'm not sure that's a bad goal for the average SF resident.

The average SF resident probably works for a tech company considering how many natives have been driven out by high housing costs. Tech companies are an enormous source of tax revenue for the city and many public services quite literally depend on that revenue. One of the major issues in the city now is the city government's obstinate refusal to approve more housing development. The idea that tech workers are gentrif…

You might be underestimating the effect of prop 13. There's a large number of older SF residents who aren't techies, but can easily afford to live here because they bought property here 20+ years ago when it was much cheaper and now pay almost zero property tax. To be sure there are a lot of people in tech jobs, but there are lots of other well-paying jobs in the city in areas like finance, law, consulting, etc.

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

#350

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

Garry Tan put out a video about it - https://youtu.be/rjgUPUKD-Sc
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