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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.’

#391

Post by jdkuepper »

xyzzyz wrote: post #376
nerdbert wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 window…

I have been driving my children to daycare for past 3 years. I will be driving my children to daycare for at least 3 more years. Bicycle is not a viable replacement for this use case, sorry. My situation is far from unique, raising children is quite universal human experience.

Counterpoint- I have three children (one still not biking in his own) and have exclusively used a cargo bike to cart them to school since Kinder unless it was exceptionally icy roads.

That said, I live in a very bike friendly city now, close to their school, can afford a cargo bike, etc.

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

#392

Post by fnimick »

scubbo wrote: post #370
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 am not talking my book Today I learned a phrase, thank you! > [Autonomous taxis are] too vital to the revitalization of SF As an expat from London - Jesus Christ, what a fucking bleak situation. To be clear, I'm not disagreeing, I think you're probably correct - the best way to get people out and spending their tech salaries in SF's service industries is to give them a fast, cheap, convenient way to get directly…

God forbid people with their bulging wallets have to share public space with The Poors!

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

#393

Post by ramraj07 »

km3r wrote: post #385
worik wrote: post #315

I lost count of how many times there was a comment about a lack of data > The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled. > city transportation leaders this time around informally collect their own incident data using 911 and 311 calls > Friedlander said the city can’t make definitive conclusions because it doesn’t have detailed data. Y…

Or Google and GM have the data, but aren't sharing it because people will overreact because despite it being an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, it still has some incidents that people will focus in on.

Sounds like apologia to me. Share the data and stop telling us how to feel about it.

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

#394

Post by fnimick »

renewiltord wrote: post #278
jtriangle wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, you have an affordable, tenuously waterproofed, chinese mass produced e-bike, it's your only available mode of transportation, you need to go into the office for a meeting, and it's raining. Welcome to hell. Also, not sure if you've used public transportation recently, but man, it SUCKS. Far less time efficient than a car, often crowded during the times you want to use it, and ZERO enforcement of proper etiquet…

It's not that hard to do. I ride in the rain and fog here in SF (the city under discussion), but you need dry pants. The real thing is that this is not an AV vs. ebike thing. Almost all people who ride bikes/ebikes here are pro-AV. It's mostly people not from SF and people who don't ride who are anti-AV. AVs are so much safer and predictable than human drivers.

I'd be cautious, considering Teslas in "self driving" have a nasty habit of running over single track vehicles (motorcycles and bicycles) because their systems don't recognize that anything narrower than a car exists.

https://www.carscoops.com/2022/10/motorcycle-advocates-warn-...

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

#395

Post by saalweachter »

jeffbee wrote: post #332
saalweachter wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although 20 percent of people in the U.S. live in rural areas and 32 percent of the vehicle miles traveled occur in rural areas, 40 percent of crash deaths occur there. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...

Continue: > Compared with urban areas, crash deaths in rural areas in 2021 were less likely to occur on interstates and freeways (14 percent compared with 21 percent) and on other arterial roads (23 percent compared with 58 percent) and more likely to occur on collector roads (44 percent compared with 11 percent) and local roads (19 percent compared with 11 percent). In other words, majority of rural traffic deaths a…

Yes, but I still reject the idea that San Francisco is an especially fatal city to drive in.

Looking for statistics on San Francisco in particular, in 2016 the city averaged an estimated 5.6 million vehicle miles per day, and an average of 29 traffic fatalities per year. That puts it at about 1.4 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles, smack dab in between the national averages for urban (1.2) and rural (1.7) traffic fatalities.

So 5 million vehicle miles continues to be a small sample size, with an estimated 0.07 deaths for San Francisco.

(I'm also not sure the drill down that urban fatalities happen on freeway & arterial roads and rural fatalities happen on local & collector roads helps the self-driving cars in SF; it seems like the speed-limited self-driving cars should be spending most of their time on the absurdly safe local roads in the city.)

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

#396

Post by orange_county »

simple-thoughts wrote: post #360
cashsterling wrote: post #206

Earlier 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…

I’m just imagining going out on an ebike in the local weather here… lol. Maybe e-bikes are a good solution in SF where the weather is great year round but not in most places in the world.

Weather isn’t the problem. Urban planning is problem and the United States does a terrible job of making transportation good for anyone but cars.

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

#397

Post by bshipp »

reaperducer wrote: post #183
bshipp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated. The two decades during which human oversight of automated systems will be mandatory would be long enough for me to finish off my career getting paid to drive while I sit in a cab writing code, periodically checking over the status of my lea…

I'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated. Trucks and cars are different. They've been running automated big rigs between Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso for a few years now.

I hadn't heard that, but a cursory Google search indicates that Kodiak is building one of these systems.

https://kodiak.ai/

Given the significant weight and danger of death for other drivers, it'll be years until legislators allow their "safety drivers" to be eliminated from the equation. This makes the AI system more akin to enhanced cruise control than robotic trucking.

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

#398

Post by cphajduk »

worik wrote: post #315

I lost count of how many times there was a comment about a lack of data > The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled. > city transportation leaders this time around informally collect their own incident data using 911 and 311 calls > Friedlander said the city can’t make definitive conclusions because it doesn’t have detailed data. Y…

On the face of it, we don't know.

It's just he said she said.

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

#399

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Retric wrote: post #226
cashsterling wrote: post #206

Earlier 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…

It doesn’t actually take that much energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle. 15,000 miles per year * 1 kWh / 4 miles ~= 10.3 kWh per day ~= 430 watts 24/7. Few loads are 24/7 but a single crypto mining PC can easily use several times that.

And if you solar charge your car it basically doesn’t matter anyway. You can charge at peak production times so it’s extremely efficient for the grid.

We also have to consider that bikes aren’t super efficient either.

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

#400

Post by gruez »

mediumdeviation wrote: post #217
dekhn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Especially when the self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at the end of the day the roads are getting less safe.

what makes you think that? "Driverless taxis" imply they're being used to transport passengers. A robotaxi taking a fare means that there isn't a human taxi taking the same fare, so human drivers are essentially being displaced.

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