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California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

cpuc.ca.gov

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Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#391

Post by jajko »

tzs wrote: post #389
_acco wrote: post #117

I love Waymo and use it all the time. One aspect I'd still like to see them figure out: As a bike commuter, I share the road with Waymo often. When cycling, you're always checking the eyes of other drivers to confirm if they see you. I've had a couple incidents where I was a little thrown/unnerved because I couldn't confirm if a Waymo was registering me. It ultimately behaved fine, but I had to put my guard way up be…

Assuming that they will eventually have displays around the sides to show ads, they could also use those to show nearby people who they see and how they plan to maneuver around them. So if they are showing an ad on the display on your side it means that either it doesn’t see you or thinks you are far enough away that it does not have to account for you in its short term planning. If it sees you and is taking you into…

If they will be running around with displays showing ads I'll never be without few rocks in my pocket just to keep things balanced and maintaining healthier society.

I know it sounds harsh, but force feeding me ads I definitely don't want to see while being unable to avoid them (stay home ain't no argument in civilized world) is unacceptable, and there is no but XYZ to make that stance any weaker.

Ads are a cancer of society, not the worst one but the core principle is rotten beyond reason - manipulate general population at your will, against their default choices, for money or power (or worse).

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#392

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #389
_acco wrote: post #117

I love Waymo and use it all the time. One aspect I'd still like to see them figure out: As a bike commuter, I share the road with Waymo often. When cycling, you're always checking the eyes of other drivers to confirm if they see you. I've had a couple incidents where I was a little thrown/unnerved because I couldn't confirm if a Waymo was registering me. It ultimately behaved fine, but I had to put my guard way up be…

Assuming that they will eventually have displays around the sides to show ads, they could also use those to show nearby people who they see and how they plan to maneuver around them. So if they are showing an ad on the display on your side it means that either it doesn’t see you or thinks you are far enough away that it does not have to account for you in its short term planning. If it sees you and is taking you into…

[deleted]

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#393

Post by xyst »

Great, more cars on the road.

I don’t know why people are excited. Whether it’s self driving or driven by a meat bag, it just means one more car on the road. One more car sitting in a parking lot/street/parking garage or driving around aimlessly until it gets assigned.

Instead of helping to alleviate traffic. TNCs were shown to actually increase traffic in urban areas [1]. I expect this won’t be any different with “self driving” vehicles.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#394

Post by jessriedel »

Sakos wrote: post #382
jessriedel wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have tried many variations out, but so far they don't seem to think they work better than doing nothing. The only communication the Waymo's currently do it to signal that they are stopping for pedestrians, both to the pedestrians themselves and also to the cars behind. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23913251/waymo-roof-dome...

I don't know how aware Waymo cars are of their surroundings. Why don't they have a (or something like a) 360 degree string of LEDs (for example on the roof) that lights up a few in the direction of human obstacles if they're close enough? Bonus points if they're colored to indicate everything is ok or there's potential caution/danger. They're still trying to do this weird universal signage when they need some way to…

> I don't know how aware Waymo cars are of their surroundings.

Waymo cars are extremely, extremely aware of their surroundings. They have a category, distance, speed, and distribution of possible future paths for all cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists within sight over 360 degrees.

> Why don't they have a (or something like a) 360 degree string of LEDs (for example on the roof) that lights up a few in the direction of human obstacles if they're close enough?

I don't think it's so obvious this helps. What is the threshold for how far away something is before it's indicated on the ring? If I'm standing just outside that distance, how will I know it's because of distance rather than because I haven't been seen? If the distance is set long, how will I know it sees me and not something behind me?

The natural way to get around these problems is for the car to "point out" everything it see using, e.g., fake eyes. But now you have a car covered in eyes surveilling the neighborhood, and people don't like that either.

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#395

Post by aetherson »

mckn1ght wrote: post #377
foota wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could pay someone California's minimum wage 24/7 for 140,000 a year.

Labor cost pretty much always increases while the cost of research technology decreases once it encounters economies of scale. A car today at the admittedly high cost estimate of $1M will “pay itself off” versus your labor estimate in less than 8 years. Humans don’t get paid off and then work for free afterwards.

A taxi doesn't have a lifespan of 8 years, and note that while I don't think that a Waymo car costs anything like $1M, it's also not actually the case that you pay taxi drivers $140k per year.

I see very little to suggest that a Waymo car costs less all-in over the course of about two years than a Prius and an Uber driver does, and that's the much more relevant comparison.

Nothing to say that this couldn't change in the future. But that's my guess for the status quo.

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#396

Post by Sakos »

jessriedel wrote: post #394
Sakos wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how aware Waymo cars are of their surroundings. Why don't they have a (or something like a) 360 degree string of LEDs (for example on the roof) that lights up a few in the direction of human obstacles if they're close enough? Bonus points if they're colored to indicate everything is ok or there's potential caution/danger. They're still trying to do this weird universal signage when they need some way to…

> I don't know how aware Waymo cars are of their surroundings. Waymo cars are extremely, extremely aware of their surroundings. They have a category, distance, speed, and distribution of possible future paths for all cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists within sight over 360 degrees. > Why don't they have a (or something like a) 360 degree string of LEDs (for example on the roof) that lights up a few in the direction of…

> What is the threshold for how far away something is before it's indicated on the ring? If I'm standing just outside that distance, how will I know it's because of distance rather than because I haven't been seen? If the distance is set long, how will I know it sees me and not something behind me?

I feel like this is a non-issue. The LEDs can be a certain size. They could be dimmable so their brightness can be modulated by distance.

All the things you mention are an issue with real drivers too, but we make it work because we can signal and communicate. Give these cars the same functionality and experiment. This isn't an insurmountable issue, but it is one that needs to be addressed that isn't being addressed at all. Throwing up your hands and saying it's too difficult is less than helpful. They're putting these things on the road with people. They have a responsibility to figure this stuff out. Especially if they want to go beyond a handful of cities.

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#397

Post by olelele »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #336
SoftTalker wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crash safety and the need for seatbelts will limit what can be done with the interior. There won't be any lay-flat seating.

> won't be any lay-flat seating If crash rates go down, and you have a flat surface that you’re strapped onto that is angled and has an airbag-like system to ensure as many G’s as eyeballs in or out, sure we could.

As far as my imagination goes any efficient seatbelts for a person lying down will be very painful in even a small incident if the passenger has a scrotum.

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#398

Post by dangus »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #113
dangus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you get injured or die? 30,000 people die of car crashes every year, about half resulting from a much more common and legal drug. How many people die of assaults on public transit every year? I’ll let you look that one up. Fear isn’t the same as risk. Lots of people are afraid of planes. Not a single passenger died of as a result of a commercial airline incident last year in the United States.

No I didn't die, but I wasn't happy either. Enough that I feel like I have more control over my fate if I drive. > Fear isn’t the same as risk. I don't think you've ever had a knife waved at you by a crazy person before. Don't be an idiot, if something looks really dangerous, it probably is. > How many people die of assaults on public transit every year? I’ll let you look that one up. The first one this year in our c…

I'm not saying that it wasn't dangerous, I'm saying that the statistical probability of the situation you were in happening and resulting in an injury or death is lower than the probability of injury or death in a motor vehicle.

You might feel like you have more control over your fate when you're driving, but as the say in the deep bowels American political culture, "facts don't care about your feelings." The same factually-incorrect risk evaluation is used by people who prefer driving over flying on a commercial airliner.

31% of all fatal crashes in 2021 involved drunk drivers, a much more common drug which is 100% legal. You don't have control over your fate in a car when other drivers on the road make up all of the moving objects that you can run into.

Not to mention the fact that crime can still happen to you while you are driving, a common example being carjacking. [1]

Your own numbers that you provided tell us the opposite story that you want to tell. The very first transit death this year just happened almost 3 months into the year. Meanwhile, 28-36 yearly car crash deaths in Seattle averages out to over 2 deaths every single month. That means by the time someone died on transit, something like 6 people had already died in car crashes in the Seattle area.

Obviously, more people are driving than taking transit, but still, in Seattle almost half of all trips downtown involve public transit.

[1] https://mynorthwest.com/3951485/docs-mom-called-911-before-b...

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#399

Post by mindstorms6 »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #9

As a resident, I don’t support this at all. Waymos are annoying to have on the road - they go extremely slowly (with good reason) and make weird traffic moves. Do we want our roads getting clogged up with super slow taxis that steal jobs from ordinary people and give them to the tech industry?

Driving the speed limit is a feature not a bug - and crucially all of the Uber drivers I've had in SF drive terribly. It's like I'm in Mario Kart.

We should be excited about not having humans drive and automating them out of this task they clearly don't want to do.

Re: California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

#400

Post by dangus »

rvnx wrote: post #90
dangus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private transit*. Uber and Waymo are private transit. Something to note is that actual public transit (buses and trains) has something like 10x fewer annual deaths than private vehicles, because fatal accidents almost never happen in them. Personal safety is a much less statistically relevant concern compared to personal injury.

There is a big difference between Uber and Waymo. You can actually be safer in a bus (aka public transit) than in Uber depending on where you live. With Uber, every time you take a taxi, you are playing the lottery, hoping you get a normal driver, who is not tired, who is not dangerous, etc. With Waymo, you get a private car, all for yourself.

Waymo has still not proven to be as safe as a public bus. It can get into a crash just like any other vehicle. It can (e.g.) be hit by a drunk driver in ways that are likely to be much more injurious to the passengers than if the same situation happened to a bus. Buses have far more inertia than the vehicles around them, they're more visible, and they are driven by professional, trained drivers. Waymo has not provided enough specific data that points to their vehicles being safer than public transit or their driving skill outperforming a trained professional driver (not just a random person with a license off the street like Uber uses). I'm skeptical considering how death rates are a full 10X lower on public transit compared to automobiles. Even if Waymo is twice as safe as a human-operated automobile, that still makes it 5x less safe than public transit.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

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