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Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

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Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#211

Post by arnaudsm »

harhargange wrote: post #89

To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain. I live in a place where public transport already has l…

In most cities in the US it's already too late. Urban sprawling and single-family-zoning lack the density for any public transport.

Technology won't be enough, this is a political problem.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#212

Post by bertil »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #193
bertil wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically. How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved. The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollu…

It is strange that you chose China! Have you seen how many kilometers of urban freeways they built in the last 30 years? It is crazy. Look at the Beijing ring roads -- a traffic clogged hell space.

No, but I have you seen the Beijing metro:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Beijing+metro

and it sounds like it got a lot better than car transport during the same period.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#213

Post by wffurr »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #193
bertil wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically. How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved. The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollu…

It is strange that you chose China! Have you seen how many kilometers of urban freeways they built in the last 30 years? It is crazy. Look at the Beijing ring roads -- a traffic clogged hell space.

China has built out both while the US has let both crumble.

The Netherlands also has both amazing public transit and amazing highways.

The US would rather argue over slashing the already meager social safety net and buy some more fighter jets, nuclear aircraft carriers, and modernize the obsolete ICBM force than invest in infrastructure these days.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#214

Post by wffurr »

kortilla wrote: post #209
Swenrekcah wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because one of the go-to talking points for postponing and diffusing support for better transit is the promise of self driving cars that will somehow solve everything. It doesn’t make sense because the traffic jam problem with cars comes not from human drivers but the physics of the car itself, but it is a persistent talking point nevertheless.

No it’s not a go-to talking point. Better transit has been deprioritized even when self driving was a complete fantasy.

I have seen plenty of examples of urban planners talking about The Future of Transport as if self driving cars will take over any day now.

Meanwhile the actual future of transport, absent public investment in transit systems, is electric micromobility devices.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#215

Post by kortilla »

gambiting wrote: post #128
komali2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there examples of European cities that "converted?" Amsterdam at least somewhat comes to mind: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...

>>Aren't there examples of European cities that "converted?" Loads and loads and loads - at least here in the UK, nearly every city centre is converting to be pedestrian only, with cars being pushed further and further out, with councils emphasising that you should really park your car at one of the massive park&ride car parks outside of the city centre then just take a metro or bus in. That's a good thing in my opin…

Not really. If the city is older than cars it didn’t really convert from a car centric city. It tried to convert to one for a while, but that’s not the same as being built with cars in existence.

Atlanta has interstate interchanges that can fit the entire Vatican in them. Every major city in the west is packed with boulevards 6 lanes across. The US didn’t just accommodate cars, it optimized for them as it was building out. Making that walkable again isn’t a matter of converting a 6 lane road into a pedestrian walkway…

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#216

Post by thfuran »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #155
robertlagrant wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, capitalist economies tax effort and spend it on longer-term things. It's democracies where things can be rolled back by the next leader that are the main cause of short-termism. (I don't have a better alternative to democracy; just stating that's where the flaw is. Well, that and zero incentive to do things well/efficiently outside of political kudos).

Things used to work pretty well in capitalist democracies when the capitalists were well regulated and taxed and the demagogues didn’t have unrestricted personal access to the voter base.

That was a pretty brief period, wasn't it?

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#217

Post by scott00 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #7
scott00 wrote: post #5

Been a flurry of self driving car safety news lately. Both Cruise and Waymo are reaching for more sophisticated comparison samples than nationwide stats to demonstrate the safety of their systems. But the obvious way to prove this, to me anyway, is to run a randomized controlled trial. Put them in a dispatch system with human driven cars, randomize whether any given assignment goes to a human or a robot, and you've g…

Out of curiosity, what would you measure? Accidents? Injuries? The power might be too low to get good data on rare events.

The existing studies have decent metrics given the sample sizes, IMO, I would use something similar. For the Cruise study that was recently released it was collisions, with sub-analyses for collisions with stationary objects, low speed collisions, and high speed collisions.

I believe that you are correct that scale is too low for analyzing injuries or deaths.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#218

Post by matwood »

watwut wrote: post #168
pembrook wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) as the US right? That alone explains literally every difference between Europe and America, in everything from public transportation down to socialist political leaning. Yes, as an engineer, it is absolutely more “efficient” if everyone lived in small government subsidized boxes, in centrally planned cities, taking centrally planne…

America has huge spaces with basically no population at all and then very populated places.

And then huge space between the two extremes that is not easily serviced. It's this space (sprawl/suburbs/low density housing/commercial) that many people live and need to commute from.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#219

Post by scott00 »

crazygringo wrote: post #10
scott00 wrote: post #5

Been a flurry of self driving car safety news lately. Both Cruise and Waymo are reaching for more sophisticated comparison samples than nationwide stats to demonstrate the safety of their systems. But the obvious way to prove this, to me anyway, is to run a randomized controlled trial. Put them in a dispatch system with human driven cars, randomize whether any given assignment goes to a human or a robot, and you've g…

Because accidents are rare and drivers are expensive so that might be the world's most expensive study to get to a statistically meaningful number. It's easy enough to simply compare with existing Uber in the same city along the same roads and get something nearly as accurate for virtually none of the cost.

Drivers doing nothing productive are expensive, but drivers working ride hail are somewhere in the range of cheap to slightly profitable.

The comparison with Uber depends strongly on how similar the dispatch profiles are, and I would not be quick to assume that they are similar. If they are limiting the self-driving cars due to weather, or time of day, or any property of trip type it could easily have a substantial impact.

Re: Waymo says insurance data shows its driverless cars are safer than humans

#220

Post by rcxdude »

bertil wrote: post #189
cipheredStones wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me. I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying. Yeah, i…

There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically. How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved. The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollu…

Public transport infrastructure at a national scale is not a dozens of billions project, it's a hundreds to thousands of billions project. The current investment in Waymo is less than the investment in the (still underfunded) NYC metro alone
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