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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.’

#991

Post by CatWChainsaw »

jrmg wrote: post #219
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.

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…

We are that far gone.

https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/a-short-comment-on-sel...

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

#992

Post by jrmg »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #991
jrmg wrote: post #219

Earlier 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…

We are that far gone. https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/a-short-comment-on-sel...

Thanks for that link. Points 8, 9 and 10 seem so appropriate.

I often feel that we’re similarly in danger of forgetting the adage that “it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent.”

I’m not sure we really are ‘that far gone’ though. I’m hopeful that people just always feel like this a little, to greater and lesser extents. Both the world and America have been through darker periods in the past.

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

#993

Post by seadan83 »

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…

Trying to engage more constructively... Do you think that this is essentially a scare-piece (and is no way supported by the relatively limited data that is available [which is a concern in of itself])?

Second question, what if the word 'skyrocket' were replaced with 'increased', would that change your perspective?

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

#994

Post by notakio »

idopmstuff wrote: post #86
notakio wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no dog in this fight. If anything, my final takeaway was that my impressions were entirely anecdotal and/or experiential, and not based on any sort of legitimate analysis with useful data. It should probably be done, but my point was more that it's only getting more complicated as people take action based on their perception, whether that perception is supported rationally or not. So now, on top of a reasonabl…

I don't think that complicates anything from a policy perspective. If self-driving cars are good (i.e. safer than human drivers), we should be rolling them out. If a small number of people interfere with them or damage them, we should just arrest those people and prosecute them for the relevant crimes. I don't think that vandalism of self-driving cars is going to be a serious issue long term, given that anyone vandal…

SFPD won't do anything about property crimes, to include vandalism, other than to take a preliminary report, on a schedule determined by the department (eg: you call them, they show up 8-12 hours later, uninterested in taking your report). This is because, currently, their DA's office isn't going to prosecute any property crimes.

That can all change, but speculating about the nature or timing of any changes like that is well outside my area, so I'll sit and watch from a distance.

And, again, I'm not vested in any outcome here. It'll work out however it works out, and I'm 2000+ miles away from it, so it won't have much effect on my life.

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

#995

Post by spaceman_2020 »

93po wrote: post #613
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d still much rather be killed by a fellow human than a corporation controlled entity. “Greater good” has been the excuse for some astonishingly bad ideas.

Over a million people a year die from traffic related incidents. It's arguably the most dangerous things many people do aside from poor diets and smoking. We need to bring this number down, and quickly. It's not going to happen as long as humans are driving.

Agree, but the solution can't involve giving away autonomy to private corporations.

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

#996

Post by microtherion »

sgillen wrote: post #606
microtherion wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3 were the Waymos being rear-ended While technically this makes them not at fault, it may represent some evidence of erratic braking behavior. Anecdotally, drivers have reported Waymo cars having a propensity for "brake checking" — not with ill intent of course, but risking accidents anyway.

I went ahead and read the accident reports, just because I was curious. In one case the AV was stopped at a red light when it was rear ended. In the second case AV slowed down for a person pushing a shopping cart into the street. In the third case the AV slowed down for pedestrians in a crosswalk. All the reports are in the report the person you are responding to posted. I do wish we had video footage of the events,…

Thanks for the additional context. It appears that in the second case, the AV was in manual mode anyway, so whatever happened cannot possibly be attributed to autonomous driving.

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

#997

Post by jarjoura »

minwcnt5 wrote: post #303
reaperducer wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the gain that those folks can find another job that’s more useful? What makes you think that if finding another job that they are capable of doing was so easy they wouldn't have already done so? Because they were waiting for some tech billionaire to throw them on the unemployment line?

No, they wouldn't have already done so, because their current job still exists and it's easier to maintain the status quo. Major structural employment changes don't happen overnight. This will take decades. AVs will decrease the demand for Uber drivers, but it doesn't mean they will all be out of a job overnight, just that incentives will slowly push workers towards other jobs.

Uber and Lyft kind of did shutdown the taxi cartels across the world in one big grassroots swing.

It took insane levels of lobbying and political power of taxis to keep a hold on some of their biggest cities, and there are now few places where non-uber/lyft style systems are still in place.

If AI taxi's are cheaper and more convenient, there's no way they won't just completely replace human taxi drivers. Cruise and Waymo have huge incentives to undercut whatever Uber would try to do. So I don't share your optimism that it will happen slowly over decades. If this self-driving system is easily repeatable elsewhere, it will likely be fast and swift.

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

#998

Post by __loam »

pms wrote: post #642
__loam wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are already required to report every accident to a public agency in California. And the safety is not hypothetical. Waymo is driving millions of miles a month in places like Phoenix. They have a ton of data to support the fact that their cars are significantly safer than human drivers.

They are required to report every accident, but not every mile these cars drive and in what conditions, so this data is unfortunately insufficient to make valid comparisons with human drivers... Really, the problem is the transparency of tech companies. If self-driving cars are really safer, then tech companies need to prove it by releasing more data than necessary, rather than less!

They are actively sharing this data with the relevant regulatory authorities.

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

#999

Post by seadan83 »

ImaCake wrote: post #494
elif wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of 911 and 311 calls: "in that month of March, dangerous self-driving car incidents increased more than 300% over the previous month (30 such incidents in February, 96 in March)." Skyrocket does not seem hyperbolic.

The parent comment is saying that the 300% increase is tied to a 300% increase in amount of driveless car activity. In which case, of course incidents increased. If you add 3x as many normal cars on the road the traffic incidents would increase in the same way!

> If you add 3x as many normal cars on the road the traffic incidents would increase in the same way!

Are you sure? In a lot of cases you would get traffic jams. The rate of incidents in a traffic jam are likely different from non-traffic jam conditions.

A study from Australia says: "Results showed an approximately linear relationship between traffic volume and accident frequency at lower traffic volumes. In the highest traffic volumes, poisson and negative binomial models showed a significant quadratic explanatory term as accident frequency increases at a higher rate." [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068508/

What's worse, a big point in the article is that we don't know exactly what the denominator is on the incident rate, and we are not even really sure what the numerator is either. The companies running these protracted live-road experiments are not being forthcoming with their data on how many cars they are running, when, and exactly what the incident count is.

Quoting the article:

"The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled. Data captured by state regulators, officials say, doesn’t capture the extent of the vehicles’ disruption and potential hazard on city streets."

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

#1000

Post by CardenB »

ketralnis wrote: post #20
codampa01314 wrote: post #11

> In San Francisco, those problems can mean self-driving cars blocking traffic, transit and emergency responders, as well as erratic behavior resulting in close calls with cyclists, pedestrians or other vehicles. I have mixed feelings about how to test self-driving vehicles (mostly stemming from ignorance). But at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigne…

> at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not making progress on this It's not my problem whether Waymo makes progress on their technology, but they make it my problem when they hit me with their car. I do have sympathy for wanting to make the progress: we might make better pacemakers faster by testing out 20 designs on 20 people. But nobody want…

> It's not my problem whether Waymo makes progress on their technology, but they make it my problem when they hit me with their car.

Have they hit anyone with their car? If they have, have they done so at a rate higher than a human driver?

What if they make it less likely for you to be hit by a car? Doesn’t that give you a benefit rather than a problem?

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