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Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

sfchronicle.com

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Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#161

Post by unshavedyak »

ssl-3 wrote: post #98
fhub wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can choose a soothing music play list in the car and it automatically resumes in the next ride Oh wow! There is a non zero chance that was implemented because of some feedback I provided as a trusted tester many months ago. I napped my son in them a lot when they were free and just spent my time thinking up things they should do and reporting them in app.

Man. My daughter's head would sometimes detach from her body and fly around the room by itself. Strapping her down in a car seat and taking her for a drive usually rectified the situation. I look forward to a future where this process can become more automated. (/s, sorta)

My father said the same for me. To this day, sleeping in the car is the easiest sleep i get. It's so soothing. Which is problematic considering i'm the sole driver for my household hah.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#162

Post by KennyBlanken »

babyshake wrote: post #49
rainsford wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a negative of Waymo or a negative of the aggressive/illegal way many humans drive? My assumption is the anecdotal speed difference you notice is Waymos actually following the speed limit, and I imagine Waymo isn't really looking to program their cars to break the law while they're trying to expand their ability to operate.

Not just humans, but Uber/Lyft drivers. It is very common for an Uber driver to perform unsafe and illegal maneuvers while driving me. I don't report them because I don't want to get them fired. Usually I don't even remark on it, unless I think they did it in a way that was especially unsafe.

If you don't hold people accountable for dangerous driving, 1)more people will drive dangerously while doing lyft/uber and 2)you are indirectly endangering vulnerable road users (people on foot and on bike, motorcycles, etc.)

Trust me, you'd feel very differently if you were on a bike regularly in the city. The lyft/uber drivers are the most dangerous drivers in the city. Have been since almost the very beginning of this ride "share" app crap.

Any time a driver did something dangerous with me in the car, they got reported and a one star rating with a comment explaining exactly why. If they did something particularly dangerous around a pedestrian or cyclist, I'd tell them the ride was over and to let me off immediately, and then call uber/lyft to report it to an agent instead of just clicking the "unsafe" button in the app.

You don't have a right to drive for a living.

If you do, you damn well should act like it is your living and be safe about it.

The whole fucking reason we have a massive problem with traffic safety in the US is because police and courts and legislators act like it's so necessary that we must endlessly tolerate people endangering others with their cars, and people get "hardship" exceptions where they're allowed to keep driving even after proving themselves to be a complete fucking menace, because "they need to get to their job" instead of "you knew you needed to be able to drive to get to your job and you still drove the wrong way down that street and hit someone? Sucks to be you."

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#163

Post by ibbih »

standardUser wrote: post #37
athoun wrote: post #26

In my experience Waymo has been much worse compared to Lyft/Uber for longer rides. A big problem with Waymo in its current state is how its routes are terribly inefficient. It purposely avoids freeways and higher speed roads, opting to take more inefficient routes without regards to the number of stop signs, hills, and other factors which will inevitably lead to a longer travel time. It's almost like it's using a wor…

Does it do a decent job of estimating the ride time?

ime it consistently overestimates ride time by 50+% or so. usually like 10-20% slower than google maps, but the estimate is often 2x what google maps says.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#164

Post by tanvach »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #63
tanvach wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth trying to sign up now. The waitlist takes a while.

It's not on a waitlist in SF anymore, Waymo is just open.

Interesting, my wife was still on waitlist in SF last week.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#165

Post by KennyBlanken »

josephcsible wrote: post #137
firloop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rarely discussed negative to Waymo is that they drive slower than human drivers. Anecdotally they can be 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic, and it's not uncommon to see human drivers do unsafe moves to pass a Waymo.

This is evidence that most speed limits are too low. The proper speed limit on any given road is the 85th percentile of what drivers actually do.

No, the proper speed limit is one that is decided based on traffic engineering safety factors such as sight distances, and who else uses that road.

Cities aren't dropping their speed limits to 25 mph for shits and giggles. They're doing it because the odds of a person on foot or bike surviving being hit by a car goes up dramatically when speed drops from 30 to 25. Fatalities drop to nearly zero at 20mph, which is why many dense residential side-streets are 20mph. It also has the nice side effect of discouraging people Waze-slaloming their way through neighborhoods instead of using major routes.

https://nacto.org/publication/city-limits/the-need/designed-...

The whole "make the speed limit what most people are doing" was just auto industry bullshit that helped make our roads even more dangerous to people not in a car or truck.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#166

Post by wepple »

paxys wrote: post #80
tanvach wrote: post #7

We recently started using Waymo more often: - Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly. - Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get. - AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver. - No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby. Negatives: - Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber. - Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations…

From my experience prices for Waymo are at least double that of an equivalent Lyft/Uber ride and wait times are usually 20+ minutes. It is a great novelty but nowhere near where it needs to be to handle real scale.

> nowhere near where it needs to be to handle real scale.

This is a phenomenally solvable problem. And it’ll scale without requiring more humans to train and monitor.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#167

Post by wepple »

labrador wrote: post #116
s09dfhks wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had someone remotely intervene on my last ride. A car was trying to parallel park on a narrow street and the waymo stayed put, despite there being plenty of room to go around. I heard a chime and a pop up on the screen said “we’re getting your waymo back on track” and it went around the car, like any sane driver would have done from the get go

That's reassuring to me. I don't know why Waymo doesn't reassure safety conscious people like me by being explicit about this. As it stands, as a computer programmer and professional driver at different times in my career, whose seen a lot of unforeseen bugs and weird driving situations, I'm not putting my life in the hands of this software.

> I'm not putting my life in the hands of this software.

If you were a professional driver, you know you put your life in the hands of people right? The average person is a pretty terrible driver. I’ll take a safely trained machine all day every day.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#169

Post by benced »

gnicholas wrote: post #78
ra7 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber. Waymo says they are a premium service like Uber Black because they have nice cars (Jaguar I-Pace), plus the novelty and safety of being driverless. They’re not trying to be competitive with Uber X or shared rides for in their current form.

How nice is the backseat of a Waymo compared to an Accord?

A little nicer but not something I'd pay for if it wasn't driverless. It's significantly more spacious than a Civic though.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#170

Post by josephcsible »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #165
josephcsible wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is evidence that most speed limits are too low. The proper speed limit on any given road is the 85th percentile of what drivers actually do.

No, the proper speed limit is one that is decided based on traffic engineering safety factors such as sight distances, and who else uses that road. Cities aren't dropping their speed limits to 25 mph for shits and giggles. They're doing it because the odds of a person on foot or bike surviving being hit by a car goes up dramatically when speed drops from 30 to 25. Fatalities drop to nearly zero at 20mph, which is why…

> It also has the nice side effect of discouraging people Waze-slaloming their way through neighborhoods instead of using major routes.

I wish cities would solve this problem by making the main roads faster instead of by making the side streets slower.

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