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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

#171

Post by more_corn »

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…

I had trouble with it not wanting to drop me where I asked, or wanting to pull over or wanting to let me out. Never again.

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

#172

Post by mbrameld »

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #46
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…

> - Consistently [...] clean [...] I don't expect this to hold true once Waymo become generally available, alas.

I suspect they visually inspect the cars after each ride and send them to the depot if there's something that needs to be cleaned up. There are several cameras inside the car giving a good view of the interior.

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

#173

Post by homefree »

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…

They’re amazing, I only take Waymo in SF now and will do the same when possible on the peninsula.

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

#174

Post by homefree »

ra7 wrote: post #53
vineyardmike wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to take it to the airport, but I imagine it’ll be a mess trying to pull up and park at departures. It’s already incredibly chaotic with the way humans are, and I don’t expect they’ll even pretend to extend any curtesy to a robot. Maybe I’m wrong though? I think they go to the airport in phoenix, I just haven’t heard any reports on the experience.

Allowing Waymo at SFO is a political mess because the airport owned by the city and the city hates robotaxis. Waymo did apply for a permit to operate at SFO, but were denied.

That’s annoying - I hope it gets worked out, that’s the last bit I need to take Waymos exclusively.

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

#175

Post by benced »

_jab wrote: post #70

Glad to see this development. The amount of FUD around AVs is too high, and allowing each individual municipality to set their own regulations for AVs would have been a ridiculous amount of red tape for these companies to deal with. Just to pull one particularly bad quote from this article: > “I hope that, in the meantime, our communities do not suffer too much in terms of injuries and community damages due to the cu…

It's been nonstop lies from opponents, especially South Bay opponents of this technology with the tiniest kernel of truth that Cruise has not been very responsible. I still can't get over San Mateo County flatly lying about Waymo not talking to them (https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/consu..., "in its protests, San Mateo stated...").

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

#176

Post by thepasswordis »

fhub wrote: post #77
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…

> 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.

It’s been that way for several years.

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

#177

Post by thepasswordis »

joshchaney wrote: post #25
AzzyHN wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did some driving in some Arizona suburbs too, iirc. The reasoning for having so much driving in SF is twofold 1. Silicon Valley, both for the workers and the general public's willingness to embrace fancy new tech 2. SF is DIFFICULT to drive in. If you follow all driving laws & drive super defensively, you'll never get anywhere on time. If an AI can learn to effectively navigate around traffic, construction, stop…

They did some driving in some Arizona suburbs too I think you are really understating it. I believe Chandler, AZ has been Waymo's proving grounds for years, and according to this article ( https://www.wsj.com/us-news/waymo-phoenix-arizona-self-drivi... ) the Phoenix area is the leader of autonomous vehicle service.

Waymo has almost completely replaced Uber/Lyft for everybody I know in the Phoenix area and it’s been this way for several years.

It’s just absolutely normalized here to the point of barely being a novelty anymore. Waymos are absolutely everywhere.

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

#178

Post by JumpCrisscross »

alex_lav wrote: post #138
cyberax wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit is actually pretty clean. The main problem is that they can't refuse to board disruptive passengers, who just trash everything around them. Waymo has cameras inside, so they can fine/ban you if you litter. The driverless cars can also, well, drive themselves to a cleaning center during the night-time when it won't affect the income generation. Another interesting possible feature is to redesign cars to…

Unsure where you’ve lived but in Philadelphia/New York/LA/SF/Seattle/Portland public transit is pretty disgusting, troublesome passengers or not.

> in Philadelphia/New York/LA/SF/Seattle/Portland public transit is pretty disgusting

In New York right now. Subway stations are dinghy. But the cars themselves are fine. Hop on the Metro-North or LIRR and they're on par with European cleanliness standards. (If not behavioural.)

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

#179

Post by kaibee »

akira2501 wrote: post #96
alooPotato wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of cleaning goes way down when you do it in bulk at a service center rather than individual lyft/uber drivers trying to do it. A standardized car also helps.

If you can incorporate the cost of large horizontal demand spikes into the off hours and you can find cheap enough labor to fill it, perhaps. The time spent travelling out of service, in cleaning, and back into service are all lost opportunities. Hopefully you can clean a very large number of cars in a very short period of time. The cars may be standard. The messes, obviously, will not be.

Once you have a large enough fleet of roughly the same shape, it starts to make sense to build some automated cleaning thing. I'm picturing like, a long tube with vacuum ports in it that can just be shoved in by a robot arm to vacuum each seat. Unless there's a wet mess, that'll basically get it 90% of the way there.

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

#180

Post by twoWhlsGud »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #162
babyshake wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is the aspect that makes me most excited about Waymo and the like –the prospect of no longer having to tolerate terrible driving because removing someone's license is akin to an economic death sentence. Fully commercialized, self-driving should provide an economic alternative to humans driving themselves. And we should be able to leverage that to stop the worst drivers ever getting behind the wheel again.
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