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

sfgate.com

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

#471

Post by ExoticPearTree »

godelski wrote: post #296
xianshou wrote: 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 driverles…

> This sounds like a bad idea. I doubt people will respond with proper context, especially given that it will still be lacking in information.

Waymo has 360 degrees cameras. There's absolutely no lack of context if the video starts 2-3 minutes before the incident and stops when everything was sorted out at the scene. Bonus points if it has audio also.

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

#472

Post by smcl »

ehsankia wrote: post #225
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…

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.

Getting big "this is actually good for Bitcoin!" vibes from this. I don't think we can fairly assess who was at fault, given that none of us were there. But it is insane to just assume a manned vehicle would have fared worse, and declare it a victory for driverless cars.

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

#473

Post by sschueller »

ruuda wrote: post #394

Everybody here is discussing the car and the cyclist, but I don't see anybody considering the possibility that the intersection design is unsafe. That there is a stop sign is a pretty bad signal in itself, Not Just Bikes made a video explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42oQN7fy_eM

Self driving cars are a misguided attempt to make driving safer when the underlying issue isn't necessarily the driver.

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

#474

Post by teekert »

LtWorf wrote: post #443
teekert wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a US perspective you have a car-first culture. If you have a bike first infrastructure you wouldn't talk like that. Here Bikes and cars are often even on different roads, where they need to cross, it's made very clear how that will work (traffic lights, clear lanes).

I mostly go on foot and… I'd go for a bicycle is always at fault law to be honest. Meek with cars and assholes with pedestrians is how cyclists mostly are.

You obviously are not from a culture where everybody is a cyclist. We have more bikes than cars in our country because you can use them at all ages and get to more places using a bike. My kids learned to ride a bike at 2.

We have some research [0], on average anybody over 6 rode a bike 232 times and an average of about 1000 km in 2022.

[0] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...

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

#475

Post by aubanel »

sschueller wrote: post #473
ruuda wrote: post #394

Everybody here is discussing the car and the cyclist, but I don't see anybody considering the possibility that the intersection design is unsafe. That there is a stop sign is a pretty bad signal in itself, Not Just Bikes made a video explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42oQN7fy_eM

Self driving cars are a misguided attempt to make driving safer when the underlying issue isn't necessarily the driver.

I think the end goal of self driving cars is simply to let people do something else than drive. Safety is only a condition for this to happen.

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

#476

Post by cm2187 »

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…

But your mother is still better off with the drunks not driving (they may crash into her car). So she may still have less accidents in a world where everyone goes self driving.

This will still leave us with the random and dangerous behaviours of cyclists and motorcycles though.

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

#477

Post by scott_w »

resolutebat wrote: post #377
talldatethrow wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Others have made better points but I want to add another thing to point out you can also be making the same "is-ought" mistake yourself:

Impaired drivers (drink, drugs, sleep), bad drivers, dangerous drivers, etc. who ought to use the self-driving function are exactly the kinds of people who won't and continue to drive badly.

What this means is the safer drivers leave it off (because they outperform the system), while dangerous drivers also leave it off because they mistakenly believe they outperform the system. The traits that it's meant to protect people from are the very traits that ensure it can't do its job.

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

#478

Post by ExoticPearTree »

smsm42 wrote: post #326

The fundamental problem of self-driving cars in cities is that they are expected to be 100% safe. They could be 10 times as safe as regular cars, but it wouldn't save them from headlines of "robot car kills an innocent person". And given how chaotic and unpredictable situation on the roads in a densely populated city without designated spaces for cyclists can be, 100% safety is impossible. Even if AI itself if perfec…

> The fundamental problem of self-driving cars in cities is that they are expected to be 100% safe. They could be 10 times as safe as regular cars, but it wouldn't save them from headlines of "robot car kills an innocent person".

Well, yes, because all the proponents of self-driving cars tout the fact that computer driven cars are way safer than human drivers. And they're not. Those 10 times safer than humans have no actual meaning in practice, because if they can brake 100ms faster than a human would, in practice it makes no difference. What would make a difference would be to be fully aware of anything that might happen, have solutions for every possibility and react accordingly in I don't know, say 20-30 milliseconds. So when a self-driving car hits and kills a pedestrian it is a failure on the self-driving system (assuming the pedestrian just doesn't jump in front of the car out of nowhere).

Self-driving cars don't have three things that humans have: instinct, experience and contextual awareness. No matter how many miles they drive, they can't learn as humans do.

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

#479

Post by sschueller »

aubanel wrote: post #475
sschueller wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are a misguided attempt to make driving safer when the underlying issue isn't necessarily the driver.

I think the end goal of self driving cars is simply to let people do something else than drive. Safety is only a condition for this to happen.

There is a better solution for that: Public transportation.

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

#480

Post by [deleted] »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #463
maxwellg wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insisting that a bicycle needs to follow the same procedures as a 3000lb internal combustion engine driven vehicle is madness. The vast majority of car laws are completely inappropriate for bicycles. Bicycles are much smaller, go much slower, can stop much faster, etc.

Then ride in dedicated bike lanes, but don't make up excuses why you should break the laws just because they are inconvenient to you.

[deleted]
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