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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

#321

Post by hombre_fatal »

zdragnar wrote: post #195
twiceaday wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that when this tech is in normal cars some will have it tuned to drive much more aggressively and/or simply have that be a setting. I suspect that would be a big selling point / driving tacitly would be an anti-selling point.

Nah, insurance companies will change their coverage rates based on the feature, and / or it'll become another legally mandated feature like backup cameras.

On the other hand, I wonder why insurance companies haven't led to the ubiquity of dashcams. I thought by now every vehicle sold would have one built in.

And my suspicion is that insurance companies don't push for you to get one because it prevents them from fighting claims that they would've won had there been no evidence.

Maybe it's similar for self-driving or whatever we're talking about here (sensors?).

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

#322

Post by foobarian »

rubyfan wrote: post #317
kaliqt wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the answer is that we clearly need that car also to be a Waymo. Problem solved! Hah.

Why don’t we have cars talk to each other and coordinate their routing? Like some sort of peer to peer mechanism that helps them not crash each other. Why can’t vehicles be made to stop at cross walks when someone is crossing with some sort of communication to the vehicle?

There is a long and glorious research bibliography on v2v comms for this purpose :-) The obstacles are pretty obvious, the chicken-and-egg problem and trust.

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

#323

Post by Vinnl »

kiba wrote: post #94
philomath_mn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I experienced this phenomena on my electric scooter. I could always scoot faster than someone walking but ultimately it makes little difference because I just spent more time for the crossing signal to turn green. So they end up catching up to me. Now, when there's long stretch or when you have to go up hill, that's where the electric scooter begins to shine and makes the largest difference.

This is also why streets inside cities in the Netherlands are converting to be single-lane, except at intersections - the ability to overtake doesn't make traffic flow faster.

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

#324

Post by hombre_fatal »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #235
kion wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I dislike about Waymo is other drivers. I've now had it happen twice that a car will fully blow through an intersection because they know a Waymo will slam on the breaks to avoid a collision. They basically abuse the car's reflexes. Also in any sort of situation where the Waymo is being very cautious the biggest danger is the impatient people behind the Waymo who will break the law to go out and around it.

Most of the world already solved this problem with red light cameras.

Returning to Houston after living abroad for 10 years, the biggest culture shock was that everyone runs red lights.

Every time the light turns green for you, you can expect 1-3 cars to keep rolling through until you can go. I've almost been rear ended by not running a light that just turned red because the person behind me also wants to floor it through. Yakety sax shit.

Then I found out in 2019, the Texas legislature outlawed the use of red-light cameras.

Muh freedum.

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

#325

Post by xnx »

Lammy wrote: post #116
sollewitt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow SF cyclist: Even setting aside the malicious SF stuff, Waymo's have enormous advantages over humans relying on mirrors and accounting for blindspots. I never have to be concerned a Waymo hasn't seen me. I can't wait until the technology is just standard on cars, and they won't let drivers side-swipe or door cyclists.

> I never have to be concerned a Waymo hasn't seen me. Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/ Their site is even proud of it: https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/ section titled “Keeping an eye on everything, all at once” “The Waymo Driver's perceptio…

There are a lot more Tesla cameras than Waymo cameras. Tesla also has a history of sharing private/intimate video from inside the cars.

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

#326

Post by broguinn »

sneak wrote: post #149
wffurr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also came up recently in a thread about speed governors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812856 Just a few governor-equipped vehicles (e.g. from public fleets or prior speeding offenders) can reduce speeding on the whole road.

On most roads, speeding isn’t a safety issue and shouldn’t be discouraged, as road throughput is important. Speed limits are usually set too low due to standardized inflexible policies or desire for revenue. On some roads, however, it is a massive safety issue, and everyone is driving unsafely because the road is designed badly for its intended purpose. (So-called “stroads” are the canonical example.)

The above comment is getting downvoted, and I suspect it's due to a misunderstanding of their intent. Yes, high speeds can make collisions (especially, as another commenter points out, to pedestrians and cyclists) more dangerous. However, just as human drivers subconsciously speed up when part of a group of cars, they are not often conscious of the environmental queues informing the speed at which they drive. Given the poster's allusion to 'stroads', I suspect that they're in favor of traffic engineering patterns that encourage speed reduction based on safe context queues without solely relying on an unenforced and often unobeyed traffic speed.

Consider this video on Dutch traffic calming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA.

Lane narrowing, raised walkways, curves in the road (chicanes), etc. are all environmental queues that enforce safe traffic speed based on context, without relying on conscious human compliance.

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

#327

Post by drunner »

Once self driving cars take over and fill the streets with gridlock autonomous traffic, the only way to get around in a city is going to be by bike.

Its great to here their algorithms are good for cyclists, a better solution is to keep investing in infrastructure that separates cyclists completely from cars.

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

#329

Post by suddenlybananas »

Ukv wrote: post #291
ringeryless wrote: post #280

i am suspicious of all the anti-human-driver comments and all the dismissal of any concerns about Waymo in the comments here. I am not convinced that public testing of such services is safe, let alone commercial service. One cannot punish a self driving vehicle in any meaningful sense. Corporate incentives vs the public commons, is a general concern that cannot be sweettalked away. The metaphors about human drivers r…

> i am suspicious of all the anti-human-driver comments [...] I am not convinced that public testing of such services is safe There are currently over a million fatalities from road traffic crashes every year, being the leading cause of death for the 5-29 year age group[0]. I'd claim that inaction is unacceptably dangerous/deadly here and that, to minimize deaths, we need to be aggressive in trying out and pushing fo…

Why not just build public transit and reduce car dependency? The technology has been here for decades and decades.

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

#330

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

Once pedestrians and cyclists figure out that Waymo cars will always stop or avoid them they will start ignoring crosswalks and signals and just cross or cut in front of them.
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