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

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

#371

Post by mlyle »

pavon wrote: post #116
readthenotes1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most of my defensive driving classes, they tell me that if I can't see it, that means there's probably a car there. So a safe human driver would not have entered the intersection while the truck was obstructing vision. That may have pissed off the people behind me, but at least I wouldn't be turning while blind.

If Waymo's description was accurate it wasn't blind when they entered the intersection. Waymo and the truck stopped at a 4-way intersection traveling opposite directions. Both entered the intersection going straight. In the meanwhile the bicycle entered from the cross street behind the truck, himself blind to what was occurring in the intersection. We'll have to wait for more information to see if that description is…

The cyclist and truck were turning.

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

#372

Post by talldatethrow »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #361
zx8080 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thare's a, probably not very obvious, situation when human could have no such accident in the same scenario. At all. Preventing an accident does not leave any trace. No one knows about the scenario if there's no accident. How many similar (and others) accidents are being prevented by human drivers daily, and no one knows about them, at all? We just don't know. That's why I take any stats of "human vs AI" driving with…

We can compare this statistically by looking at accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven of autonomous cars vs humans. Over long mileage, the rate of prevented accidents shows up in the data as a lower overall accident rate. I don't have the stats at hand but Waymo does great on this stat. Now, that's not to say that Waymo would avoid any specific accident better than a human. But from a public health standpoint, that's…

IMO these are a slightly fake stat. You're comparing to overall stats, that include the drunk, the high, the sleep deprived, and the crazy wild aggressive wreckless.

If you compare to my mother driving, the injuries per mile are higher in autonomous.

You can argue that I'm making an unfair distinction since those people exist, but I'd say the people driving under those conditions are commiting a crime and shouldn't be counted the same.

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

#373

Post by hot_gril »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #185

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…

Maybe "so much for safety" refers to the cyclist turning left without looking.

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

#374

Post by panopticon »

viraptor wrote: post #365
petre wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a recent accident that happened in my country, a human driver swerved to avoid a cyclist that was quickly switching lanes without signaling in order to cross from one side to another. The swerving car went over the sidewalk and killed a pedestrian. You should draw your own conclusions.

This is my pet peeve with people being so sure online about their abilities of avoiding things on the road. Yeah, maybe you could avoid it with your super human reflexes, but there physically no way you could check that side of your car, register what's there, decide whether you can move that way and then did it. The kneejerk avoidance reaction may be extremely dangerous on its own. (Also in Oz, rolling your car when…

I swerved into another lane to avoid another car cutting me off during rush hour once. It all happened so fast, and I will always remember how incredibly lucky I was that no one was in the lane I moved into.

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

#375

Post by dang »

soraki_soladead wrote: post #204

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…

Please let's not do the bikes vs. cars flamewar all over again. It's surprisingly nasty and always the same.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39298127.

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

#376

Post by huytersd »

smt88 wrote: post #319
insane_dreamer wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you choose to blow through the stop sign because it "looks safe", you should bear the full responsibility for that decision. (I say this as an avid cyclist who sometimes blows through stop signs.)

> you should bear the full responsibility for that decision That's not fair to pedestrians or other cyclists who can be injured by your decision to break the law and ignore their safety.

To clarify, the cyclist is the one breaking the law here.

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

#377

Post by resolutebat »

talldatethrow wrote: post #372
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can compare this statistically by looking at accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven of autonomous cars vs humans. Over long mileage, the rate of prevented accidents shows up in the data as a lower overall accident rate. I don't have the stats at hand but Waymo does great on this stat. Now, that's not to say that Waymo would avoid any specific accident better than a human. But from a public health standpoint, that's…

IMO these are a slightly fake stat. You're comparing to overall stats, that include the drunk, the high, the sleep deprived, and the crazy wild aggressive wreckless. If you compare to my mother driving, the injuries per mile are higher in autonomous. You can argue that I'm making an unfair distinction since those people exist, but I'd say the people driving under those conditions are commiting a crime and shouldn't b…

You're making a classic is-ought fallacy here. Drunk, high, sleep deprived or "crazy wild aggressive reckless" human drivers ought not to exist, but they do, and thus it's absolutely fair to compared autonomous drivers against them.

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

#378

Post by shadowgovt »

talldatethrow wrote: post #372
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can compare this statistically by looking at accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven of autonomous cars vs humans. Over long mileage, the rate of prevented accidents shows up in the data as a lower overall accident rate. I don't have the stats at hand but Waymo does great on this stat. Now, that's not to say that Waymo would avoid any specific accident better than a human. But from a public health standpoint, that's…

IMO these are a slightly fake stat. You're comparing to overall stats, that include the drunk, the high, the sleep deprived, and the crazy wild aggressive wreckless. If you compare to my mother driving, the injuries per mile are higher in autonomous. You can argue that I'm making an unfair distinction since those people exist, but I'd say the people driving under those conditions are commiting a crime and shouldn't b…

Unfortunately, we can't replicate your mother and put her behind the wheel of every vehicle in America. But we can crank out thousands of autonomous vehicles with thousands of identical copies of highly tuned safety algorithms.

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

#379

Post by resolutebat »

godelski wrote: post #306
shuckles wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not. AB122 passed the legislature to legalize the California roll for cyclists, because coming to a full stop at a stop sign makes no sense for riders with high visibility. Newsom vetoed it for stupid culture war reasons. It’s a law that doesn’t make sense so it’s not a big issue if it isn’t followed.

> because coming to a full stop at a stop sign makes no sense for riders with high visibility. For anyone wondering why I give an explanation here[0]. The tldr is you need to move to be safe and it is harder to get a bike moving than it is a car. It's best to contextualize any such arguments around the operations that go into operating the vehicle and cars and bikes have a lot of differences. Those differences are wh…

The comment you link to has been flagged.

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

#380

Post by shadowgovt »

gnicholas wrote: post #343
ehsankia wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more impressively, even in this seemingly worst case scenario where everything lined up as poorly as it could have, the car was still able to react quite aggressively and the situation ended only with minor scratches it seems? Honestly, if anything, this is probably proof that self-driving is the future, as I would bet any human would've most definitely done much worse in the same scenario.

I wonder if a human driver would have (for better or worse) swerved to avoid hitting the cyclist. That is, the Waymo might be programmed to only execute certain types of evasive maneuvers, whereas a human would instinctively do other things as well. Of course, if there were someone in the vehicle's blind spot, it's possible this would have resulted in a worse accident, since there would have been no time for a human…

Broadly speaking (and this is a very broad brush, details may differ), autonomous vehicles will resolve collision avoidance by doing something legal.

Swerving is not legal and it's not legal because you might hit something you can't see. On the other hand, an autonomous vehicle maintains perpetual 360° situational awareness so it already knows whether it's safe to swerve.

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