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New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

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Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#51

Post by JumpCrisscross »

matttproud wrote: post #39
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #28

Anecdotally, as someone who bikes a lot in SF, Waymo's are a lot safer than human drivers simply because they follow the letter of traffic laws. Stopping at stop signs, waiting for pedestrians to clear the box, following the posted speed limits, etc.

I was just on a business trip to San Francisco for a few days, and I observed the near opposite of this from the Waymo fleet in SoMa: * Waymo vehicle creeping into the pedestrian crosswalk (while the pedestrians had right of way to cross), which caused someone to have to walk around the car into the intersection ahead of the Waymo. * Waymo vehicle entering a dedicated bike lane and practically tailgating the bicyclis…

Neither of the examples you cite strike me as particularly dangerous nor even illegal. The pedestrians were given the right of way. And entering bike lanes is fine for crossing or short distances where merited unless grade separated.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#52

Post by DAGdug »

crazygringo wrote: post #26
timewizard wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless. 50% of fatalities involve alcohol or drugs and are often single vehicle accidents. 25% involve youth or inexperience. 15% involve motorcycles. 15% involve pedestrians. What I really need to see is a complete breakdown of every accident a Waymo has had. Then I can start to com…

> The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless. No, that's not how statistics works. The percentage data's accuracy depends mainly on the number of incidents recorded (and somewhat on the rate of incidents). But the percentage of the whole is completely irrelevant. If you are basing something on 10 incidents but it's 50%…

This! (Thank you for the comment). There’s a reason a 1000 random samples is adequate to reasonably estimate what’s common metrics in a population the size of USA or India (or infinitely large).

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#53

Post by timewizard »

D-Coder wrote: post #40
timewizard wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless. 50% of fatalities involve alcohol or drugs and are often single vehicle accidents. 25% involve youth or inexperience. 15% involve motorcycles. 15% involve pedestrians. What I really need to see is a complete breakdown of every accident a Waymo has had. Then I can start to com…

> 50% of fatalities involve alcohol or drugs and are often single vehicle accidents. This suggests that Waymo is cutting traffic fatalities by 50% (per million miles) right off the top.

If an only if every drunk person decides to take one instead of driving themselves home.

Drunk people being known for having exceptionally poor judgement and self awareness.

It suggests that they _could_ cut fatalities by that much. Then again, a whole new mode of accident, where the inebriated decide to step out of a moving vehicle and injure themselves that way.

This is a dynamic system where human decisions are never fully removed from the loop.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#54

Post by zitterbewegung »

rozap wrote: post #36
buckle8017 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an incentive problem. Uber/Lyft drivers are strongly incentivized to drive as quickly and aggressively as possible. The individual drivers are trading risk for cash. A company like Google isn't going to make that trade because it's actually the wrong trade across millions of hours.

There was a study a few years back that showed male uber drivers earned more than female drivers. How could this be so, when the dispatch algorithm doesn't discriminate? Turns out men just drive a little faster in the aggregate so they made iirc around 3% more money.

Not sure if this is the study but this looks like a good study where they found it was 7% when the study was done.

https://economics.uchicago.edu/news/study-finds-gender-pay-g...

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#55

Post by biophysboy »

johnfn wrote: post #37

As someone who is often on SF city streets without a car - I bike and run a lot - I absolutely love Waymo. I am continuously seeing human drivers cut me off, perform illegal maneuvers (i.e. run red lights when I'm going through a crosswalk), and break various other traffic laws. All these things genuinely put people in danger. Just the other day, a guy started running a "no right turn on red" lane in SF, and when I p…

I am also hopeful that Waymo has other positive externalities for bikes/pedestrians: less need for parking spots, car ownership, etc. At the same time, I guess you could say the same for rideshare, so it would depend on if robo-rideshare is cheaper than ownership

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#56

Post by jmm5 »

ziddoap wrote: post #46
xnx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a 3x effect for insurance agencies: 1) Google/Waymo doesn't buy insurance for their vehicles 2) Waymo vehicles are much less likely to cause accidents 3) Waymo vehicles actively avoid being hit and calm traffic overall

I'm not super familiar with this space, or laws where Waymo is active, what do you mean Google/Waymo don't buy insurance for their vehicles? Is having insurance not legally required? Do they just pay out when there's an accident where they injure someone?

Large companies with fleets of vehicles often self-insure.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#57

Post by jeffbee »

indigodaddy wrote: post #34

How do AI cars fare with those instinctual "decide which way to swerve in a split-second" scenarios that come up maybe once every 10-20 years over the course of a driver's history?? It's happened to me about 2-3 times and I've always made the "(assumedly) correct" split second swerve decision. Wondering if that is a "human/instinctual" skill and if AI cars do just as well or better, or perhaps not as good? I don't ha…

It's just ape hubris that makes you think these were the right swerves instead of just dumb luck that you did not flip over the center barrier head-on into a school bus.

The Waymo doesn't have to swerve as much as a human because it can see a mile away and never blinks, and it knows that the right thing to do in every swerve-worthy situation is to slam on the brakes to take the energy out of the event. It also drives around with the brakes pre-pressurized because it isn't trying to compensate for the fact that its control system is partially made of meat. Anyway you can go to r/waymo or r/selfdrivingcars for lots of videos of Waymos avoiding objects.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#58

Post by philomath_mn »

johnfn wrote: post #37

As someone who is often on SF city streets without a car - I bike and run a lot - I absolutely love Waymo. I am continuously seeing human drivers cut me off, perform illegal maneuvers (i.e. run red lights when I'm going through a crosswalk), and break various other traffic laws. All these things genuinely put people in danger. Just the other day, a guy started running a "no right turn on red" lane in SF, and when I p…

Best part is that they probably have data to show that all that patience costs the typical passenger mere seconds to a minute on 99% of rides.

This has always bothered me about aggressive or impatient human drivers: they are probably shaving like 30 seconds off of their daily commute while greatly increasing the odds of an incident.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#59

Post by bwy »

indigodaddy wrote: post #34

How do AI cars fare with those instinctual "decide which way to swerve in a split-second" scenarios that come up maybe once every 10-20 years over the course of a driver's history?? It's happened to me about 2-3 times and I've always made the "(assumedly) correct" split second swerve decision. Wondering if that is a "human/instinctual" skill and if AI cars do just as well or better, or perhaps not as good? I don't ha…

They test extensively on those types of scenarios. See: https://waymo.com/research/collision-avoidance-testing-of-th...

Blog post for the paper: https://waymo.com/blog/2022/12/waymos-collision-avoidance-te...

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#60

Post by timewizard »

DAGdug wrote: post #52
crazygringo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless. No, that's not how statistics works. The percentage data's accuracy depends mainly on the number of incidents recorded (and somewhat on the rate of incidents). But the percentage of the whole is completely irrelevant. If you are basing something on 10 incidents but it's 50%…

This! (Thank you for the comment). There’s a reason a 1000 random samples is adequate to reasonably estimate what’s common metrics in a population the size of USA or India (or infinitely large).

Random samples of the _same_ user base.

If the user base of "waymo riders" and "everyday drivers" does not match then you're not sampling what you think you are.

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