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Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

sfgate.com

241–250 of 750 posts

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#241

I would love to hear some stats on how many car/bike collisions happen every day in SF.

Prior to the pandemic an average of 1.4 bike accidents per day - https://www.mjqlaw.com/san-francisco-2022-bicycle-accident-s...

I am unable to drill down on my phone right now but presumably we can figure this out for other years thanks to the visionzero plan/project. https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fataliti...

Yes I know this site only shows fatalities but I'm assuming the data is there if somebody is able to figure out the API/powerbi stuff?

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#242
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rolling through stop signs while cycling is generally appropriate (and is the law in more enlightened places). In California it may be illegal, but so is a car exceeding the speed limit, and few would excuse Waymo for hitting one of those.

Only if you have right of way. You still treat it as a yield, which means if you don't have a right of way, you stop completely.

Rolling is usually slow enough to stop on a dime from my experience. The problem is cyclists who continue at full speed and then decide to react last second.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the driving software will be updated, the intersection will not be redesigned to reduce the severity of driver mistakes. It’s not the best outcome, ideally someone will analyze the case and produce the changes that needed to made to the driving software, the intersection, and biking behavior (aka the Dutch approach).

Fair, but then again, this would be taking drastic measures for a single data point. A full redesign would be quite a stretch for a single accident and nearly impossible to scale. The least you'd need to do is check for a pattern of accidents.

Yet that’s exactly what the Dutch do:

https://www.bicyclelaw.com/after-every-crash-in-netherlands-...

> In the Netherlands, accidents like these are followed by intense investigations, street redesign, and criminal prosecution on a level wholly different from Boston, where a slew of bike fatalities in recent years have prompted modest on-street changes and police crackdowns on bicyclists running red lights. But there have been few street design overhauls and no criminal convictions of motorists in those fatal accidents.

I’m pretty sure there is an HN discussion on this article somewhere.

Ah, the highest level of scrutiny is limited to and mandatory for fatalities, which makes sense.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#244
post #11

So the scenario (as described by waymo, surely with some spin): "Driving through a 4 way intersection, while a large truck is also going through the intersection. As you go through, a biker quickly passes behind the truck with minimal time to react once in sightlines." A human driver would take significantly longer to react, and could be deadly. Waymo managed to hit the breaks before the collision, potentially leadin…

I feel like you are injecting facts with a lot of assumptions. How do we know a human driver would have taken longer? What if the human would have seen the bike 200 yards up the road 45 seconds ago, and since bikes don't disappear, waited a half second before proceeding into the intersection. Or what if a small portion of the bike was visible? It could have been absolutely unavoidable but I don't think we know that n…

As a cyclist, I'm invisible to drivers quite often even when I'm not hiding behind a truck. Many drivers also immediately forget you after overtaking you just seconds ago and attempt a right-hook. It is of course possible that a human's advanced reasoning could have avoided the situation as described, but imo that would've been sheer luck or a very unusual driver.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"Embarrassing" is a strange way of saying "potentially deadly" (for example, https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-cycl... ).

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And? Is that somehow bad? This seems to be a common motorist talking point, but I've never understood what it's supposed to imply. Yes, it can be very bad. Drivers not being predictable is a big cause of car crashes. I was always taught that when driving, don't be nice, be predictable. It's also a large part of defensive driving. A cyclist that is sometimes acting like a vehicle, and at other times as a pedestrian…

Cyclists act like cyclists, and are more or less predictable when treated as such. Cyclists are not vehicles, and it doesn't make sense to insist they behave like vehicles. The theory of vehicular cycling was one of the worst things to happen to the development of a safe cycling community in America. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/28/why-john-fores...

> Cyclists act like cyclists, and are more or less predictable when treated as such.

Except when they ignore stop signs and blow through an intersection when it's not their turn, causing a car that has the right of way and is already in the intersection to slam on their brakes to try to avoid killing the cyclist, resulting in the car losing traction due to the weather conditions and to slide into a tree. Saw it happen in front of my eyes just a few days ago.

Or when to avoid stopping behind a car that was already in the turn lane in front of them, they hop up on the sidewalk and then cut off the car via the sidewalk, nearly running down several pedestrians. That one was earlier this afternoon.

Cyclists and pedestrians are not the same, and should not be treated the same, or interchangeably. I agree that the way that infrastructure is set up right now is terrible for cyclists. But it is how things are right now, and ignoring that is silly. It's not at all that different from how having pedestrians and cyclists sharing the same roadway is also not the best of ideas.

But in addition, you know those signs they have up on the side of the road, the "Share the Road" ones? Sharing goes both ways.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#248

I'm disappointed in all the folks immediately blaming the cyclist without further information, and I'm similarly disappointed in all the folks blaming Waymo for the same reason. But, unless they somehow have extra information we're not privy to, I'm much more disappointed in the S.F. Supervisor quoted in the article, Shamann Walton, for immediately going online to say "so much for safety." Us internet weenies are alw…

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Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#249
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision. The "fully visible" part made me thinks humans can identify a bicycle and rider with just partial visibility, which means they would stop faster than the car.

Even if a human sees the bike slightly sooner, the reaction time is so much slower that it's either a wash or the self driving car is likely still faster. Median braking reaction time for humans is ~500ms[1]. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26376036/

I can't read that article, but I suspect they're not including all the required foot movement there.

This study [1] shows ~2 seconds from gas lift to max brake force, when using right foot.

Eliminating the foot movement is why I left foot brake. I feel like I have some superpower with how fast I can react, compared to others. After all, we were taught to brake with our right foot out of tradition, not data!

[1] https://copradar.com/redlight/factors/IEA2000_ABS51.pdf

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#250

"S.F. Supervisor Shamann Walton responded to the news of the collision on social media, saying, “So much for safety.”" Why the snark? It seems it was a hard call, something that a human driver would not have caught and potentially caused a deadlier accident. As I see it there wasn't an investigation from the cyclists p.o.v.

The citizens of SF expect their elected officials to put on a good show.

Running the city well is too boring. Here's an article with the same supervisor threatening the sheriff's deputy running the metal detector in city hall: https://abc7news.com/shamann-walton-racial-slurs-sf-board-of...

To be fair all the supervisors and other electeds are clowns - nothing remarkable about Walton.

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