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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.’

#561

Post by yetanotherloser »

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.

Raising kids without driving them anywhere, but instead teaching them to walk early, walk often and walk far is also easy - and really good in lots of ways - unless you live in one of those awful places with no sidewalk/pavement, in which case move or campaign for one. Raising children without cars is still something of a majority experience in the world and was universal for millennia. They have legs, and are portable until well after you've raised them to use them.

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

#562

Post by stevekemp »

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.

Raising children is universal, but the environments differ significantly.

I took my child to daycare by pushing a pram 500m. Later I'd half-carry him, and half let him walk. After he was walking consistently he later started to cycle there himself, as I walked alongside.

In a few weeks he'll be walking to his school himself, again a distance of approximately 400-500m - with only one road to cross.

I've seen children take themselves to school from age seven by bus, tram, cycles, or walking here. It is common-place.

Maybe that isn't possible in America because the houses and the schools/daycares are too distant. But that's certainly not universal.

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

#563

Post by theptip »

jacquesm wrote: post #230
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…

You can normalize the report by miles driven, but if the number of miles driven by those services increases rapidly then you can expect the number of incidents to increase just as rapidly, and that is what appears to be happening. There is a level at which this becomes untenable and that level is a direct function of the number of miles driven. So unless you see some kind of cap to the number of miles driven (which g…

I think this is not taking the analysis far enough. You need to compare incidents per passenger mile, with humans vs. AV.

If AVs are safer, and you increase the AV miles driven, presumably you mostly displace human miles driven (e.g. Uber). In this possible word you would see the missing graph of human-driven harm go down, but you’d still see the graph from the OP go up. Indeed in this scenario the more the AV mischief goes up, the better, as that would be implying that there are fewer humans on the road. (Obviously it’s not only displacement but I think that’s the first-order effect.)

Without quantifying the level of human-related mischief, I don’t think it’s wise to draw strong conclusions.

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

#564

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> 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.

Silly early morning thought: if the local government has failed to provide adequate public transportation (buses, trams etc.), what's preventing the private sector from stepping up?

I mean, even in the form of vans that would seat around 10 people or so, or smaller buses that don't have many infrastructure requirements like trams would.

If all of these modern ride companies are so good at aggregating data about trips and have modern apps, then surely they'd be able to come up with profitable routes and get people where they need to go. Of course, buying their own fleet of vehicles would be challenging, but what's the actual dealbreaker here?

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

#565

Post by hyperman1 »

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.

I assume this depends on where you live. Around here, it's very doable. I see a lot of ebikes with 1 or 2 child seats, and carriages for up to 3 extra children or groceries.

I have 1 kid, and we always went to the daycare by bike. Last year, age almost 5, I bought a followme, and it works great. He's 6 now. When we bike more than a few km or when it rains, he gets connected to the followme, otherwise he bikes by himself. My ebike did 2500km in what's now almost a year, easily paying itself by the gas we didn't buy. The car is mostly used for big groceries every 2 weeks.

Most roads have bike paths. On the way to school, 1.5km away, there are still 2 places where we have to cross unsafe car roads. Ironically, one is the school entrance. I think 1 parent in 3 or 4 still come by car, and their driving makes it harder for the others.

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

#566

Post by Tade0 »

yayitswei wrote: post #557
Tade0 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficiency is not everything. In the Netherlands for a third year in a row there are more fatalities among cyclists than car passengers: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2023/16/more-traffic-deaths-in... More than half of those deaths are people over the age of 75. Close to 85% - the 50+ cohort(so including the previously mentioned group). The Netherlands treats road safety seriously and spent decades prioritizing bicyc…

This could be expected if the ratio of bikes to cars is much higher than in other places.

It's a recent phenomenon - there were many bikes before and no such issues.

What's worrying is that fatalities are higher despite bicycles not being a large part of the modal split:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/449436/netherlands-modal...

The few local accounts that I gathered point to older people using e-bikes (or even so-called fast bikes) and going too fast compared to their situational awareness.

It's the same problem as with elderly drivers, just more pronounced because bicycles give little to no protection.

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

#567

Post by heyoni »

aluminum96 wrote: post #433
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…

Waymo and Cruise won't actually release comprehensive data. So anecdotes are all we have to go by... and they don't look particularly good. These are egregious driving mistakes that a human driver would almost never make. - https://twitter.com/desertflyer/status/1677464706251128832 - https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368 Everyone needs to experience these things for themselves before unleashing them o…

I thought all incidents were tracked by the dmv and publicly available. Unless you mean it’s not comprehensive enough…if so, what does that mean?

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

#568

Post by FuckButtons »

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…

This argument assumes that there’s an alternative world where people can go from A to B without that extra mass. But given the highway and road system we have and the inherent danger of driving on it (hence the mass) I fail to see how you propose to achieve that.

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

#569

Post by andbberger »

FuckButtons wrote: post #568
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…

This argument assumes that there’s an alternative world where people can go from A to B without that extra mass. But given the highway and road system we have and the inherent danger of driving on it (hence the mass) I fail to see how you propose to achieve that.

you change the system. obviously.

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

#570

Post by mikojan »

KronisLV wrote: post #564
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…

> 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. Silly early morning thought: if the local government has failed to provide adequate public transportation (buses, trams etc.), what's preventin…

> what's preventing the private sector from stepping up?

Government has been providing adequate infrastructure for private interests to sell cars in instead of providing adequate public transportation.

Roads, parking spots, traffic signs and lights, and all the administration and policing and legal apparatus required to make motorized individual transport a reality do not just magically exist.

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