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

sfchronicle.com

441–450 of 1001 posts

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

#442
post #385
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.

Humans cause fatalities 1 per 100 million miles.

There is no way to truly evaluate safety being an order of magnitude better until we have 1 billion miles driven.

You can crash less often (reduce fender benders) but kill more people (have rare but egregious errors) so I am not interested in seeing statistics about incidents or collisions.

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

#443
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E-bikes are a non-started due to theft problems. If you think coning of a robo-taxi is bad, have a few prowlers coming by every hour looking for a bike to poach, it is much worse for the e-bike crowd. If you are going with taxis/ubers/personal transit anyways, I think autonomous makes a lot of sense. They basically allow you to optimize your road bandwidth if taken to an extreme level (which I'm sure more authoritari…

Unless we're ever ready to start treating bike thieves like horse thieves, that's unlikely to ever change. And I doubt we'll ever have the political will to do that, or even a kinder gentler version of it.

Ya, but that just means I'm more likely to have an EV car than E-bike. The former is must less likely to get stolen, and the latter can still be very expensive (although not as expensive as the EV car).

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

#444

>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 personally don’t care that much the collision rate. I care about the fatality or injury rate (deaths or injuries per miles driven)

I don’t mind picking an Uber driver if it reduces my chances of getting hurt, even if we are slightly more likely to experience a fender bender.

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

#445
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans cause fatalities 1 per 100 million miles. There is no way to truly evaluate safety being an order of magnitude better until we have 1 billion miles driven. You can crash less often (reduce fender benders) but kill more people (have rare but egregious errors) so I am not interested in seeing statistics about incidents or collisions.

It is actually at 1.5 per 100m miles now. In some countries, like China, it is much worse (63k a year!).

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

#446
Is this what Garry Tan's video (The Truth and Lies About Driverless Cars in SF [1]) was all about? I find him to be pretty credible in general, and he makes a strong case that there are some folks within the city government who are misrepresenting the safety record of self-driving cars. I don't know much about the situation, and I'm glad this testing isn't happening where I live (we do have tons of testing on the peninsula, but it's with humans in the vehicle). But I think it's important for companies and regulators to be honest about what is happening, whichever way the facts come out.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc

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

#447
post #376

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.

I mean, maybe? I bike my two children to preschool + elementary on a cargo e-bike, weather permitting, and it's fantastic. Sometimes I take both at the same time, sometimes my wife and I split them up. Works great. When the weather sucks we drive or bus but it handles more than 50% of our trips.

The cargo + electric combo is really amazing.

The bike, a Tern GSD with a big two passenger seat for the kids, wasn't cheap ($6k) but it lets us get away with owning only one car using far less uber'ing, and is way less expensive and hassle than a second car.

(This is in Pittsburgh - it's hilly and we have weather, but we don't have too many bike-hostile drivers in the city)

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

#448
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…

> Remember: reality is banal.

Isn't that just going in the other direction?

I doubt corporations doing open-ended research, testing, and development on public roads can truly be described as banal.

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

#449
Now present the data in incidents per vehicle mile and compare it to human drivers please? Very difficult to take anything seriously that doesn't compare this technology to humans when it comes to safety. We're terrible drivers on the whole.

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

#450

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…

It would also be more efficient if everyone lived in boarding houses and huddled together for warmth in the winter instead of using a heater. Fortunately we were born into a wealthy society with technology that lets us produce all the energy we need so we can optimize for things like comfort, convenience and quality of life instead of focusing purely on efficiency.
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