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

sfgate.com

291–300 of 750 posts

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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo needs to do nothing to avoid this in the future if their vehicle was following the rules of the road and the cyclist did not.

You may want to look into the concept of the "Failure to Avoid" or "Failure to Reduce Speed" citation. These encapsulate scenarios where it there was reasonable opportunity to avoid or stop before causing a collision. You don't just get to careen into a collision because someone else is not following the rules of the road, hoping for a payday.

Ok, but neither of those things apply in this case.

Obviously Waymo vehicles should be slowing down to try to avoid a collision / reduce the severity. But in this case it sounds like the "fix" would be fundamentally changing the cars behavior to be far too conservative.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> The felony conviction was the first of its kind in the nation involving a bicyclist. The list of things that have killed one person in the last several hundred years is long. Everything is potentially deadly by that standard. Here's a case mentioned in Law's Order: "The plaintiff was about 14 years of age, and the defendant about 11 years of age. On the 20th day of February, 1889, they were sitting opposite to each…

It's the first felony conviction, not the first time a cyclist has killed someone.

Usually they get charged with a misdemeanor or not at all.

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

#293

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…

Based on waymos description, it seems pretty cut and dry that this was literally an “accident” where the biker maybe should have waited until the lane cleared and any car would have hit them in the same situation. If anything they can use this data to see how it maybe could be prevented in the future.

Maybe waymo was still in the wrong for some reason? Sadly the article that goes in depth after we have more details and can more clearly report if waymo is to blame will likely not get nearly as much traction as this headline.

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

#294

Agree that's not a great look for the supervisor. Cyclists have a bad rep in SF because many (not all) ride quite dangerously. It's a common sight to see cyclists running four-way stop signs and lights without even yielding. I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly. Meanwhile, Waymo has millions of incident-free miles and of all the self-driving car compa…

>I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly.

You should try paying attention to the cars. I live near one (elsewhere) as well and I see cars driving straight through it all the time. Why have a double standard?

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

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

You can kill someone. That's more than embarassing. I'm astounded that you think bicyclists killing pedistrians is just fine.

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/04/22/pedestrian-st...

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

#296
post #7

If Waymo is truly as much better than Cruise as the statistics claim, this is a perfect opportunity to release the full video of the incident. Most collisions are avoidable, but a few are the result of a perfect storm of conditions that would be difficult to navigate for even the most skilled human driver. To know whether the truck's occlusion of the cyclist is one of those cases requires the actual footage.

This sounds like a bad idea. I doubt people will respond with proper context, especially given that it will still be lacking in information. We already see people here making assumptions without sufficient evidence. Anything with cars and cyclists is always heated and we just get a lot of biases.

I think it is better that we distinguish that this type of event does not actually inform us about the safety of driverless cars nor does it provide enough information to adequately update our positions in either direction. It is void of so much context that it is essentially just noise. These things are hard to measure and even harder to make accurate decisions on. In an extreme case, it is possible for driverless cars to be "better than humans" at driving in the notion of accidents per mile (even normalized) while also being "worse than humans" in the notion of striking cyclists or pedestrians. "Accidents per mile" marginalizes the type of accident, but this would be important information as to making effective policy about when and where a driverless car can deploy (e.g. on average fewer accidents but most miles are on the highways. If there's a high rate of failure in detecting children in suburban settings, I sure wouldn't want that car driving in residential areas. The nuance matters). I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of us here on HN have a poor concept as to what the actual nuanced data says here and personally I feel like a video would only further sensationalize the event. I would not be surprised if a video were released which showed that Waymo could have not performed any better (without x-ray vision or omniscience) yet it also be used to further cases against them. I'm sure most people would make an accurate and reasonable conclusion upon seeing the video, but I still don't have faith that that means it wouldn't end up being sensationalized.

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

#297

Agree that's not a great look for the supervisor. Cyclists have a bad rep in SF because many (not all) ride quite dangerously. It's a common sight to see cyclists running four-way stop signs and lights without even yielding. I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly. Meanwhile, Waymo has millions of incident-free miles and of all the self-driving car compa…

>I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly. You should try paying attention to the cars. I live near one (elsewhere) as well and I see cars driving straight through it all the time. Why have a double standard?

I think all of us agree that cars shouldn’t blow through intersections, neither should bicycles. It definitely raises my eyebrows more if cars do it (rare but sadly increasingly less rare) vs if bicycles do get it (fairly common).

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

#298

Agree that's not a great look for the supervisor. Cyclists have a bad rep in SF because many (not all) ride quite dangerously. It's a common sight to see cyclists running four-way stop signs and lights without even yielding. I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly. Meanwhile, Waymo has millions of incident-free miles and of all the self-driving car compa…

> Cyclists have a bad rep in SF because many (not all) ride quite dangerously. It's a common sight to see cyclists running four-way stop signs and lights without even yielding.

Pick any stop sign in SF. Watch it for an hour and count the number of cars that come to a complete stop. The denominator doesn't matter because the numerator will be ~0.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the privacy of the bicyclist? What if it was his/her mistake and they don't want to be ridiculed by the entire world?

You can blur their face?

You can still be identified by things other than your face.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the privacy of the bicyclist? What if it was his/her mistake and they don't want to be ridiculed by the entire world?

There is no expectation of privacy with what happens on a public road. See all the dashcam videos on YouTube.

> There is no expectation of privacy with what happens on a public road.

There's a common misconception that there is not an expectation of privacy in public but this is not supported by the law. The notion does not help people but does help those that wish to surveil. Be careful with this claim.

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