New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by scld » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

manquer wrote: post #150

xnx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to be skeptical of the source, but I can't remember seeing any substantive criticism of the methodology or conclusions.

Here is one, Humans drive in all weather conditions on all types of roads and also many types of personal vehicles of varying ages and conditions. Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather and is limited to a relatively large and safer expensive SUV that is maintained professionally in a fleet. Studies like this rarely account for such factors , they are compare o…

Maybe humans shouldn't drive in those conditions then.

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

#342

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Fri, May 02, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

echoangle wrote: post #306

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :/ It's not going to be stored forever. That would be incredibly expensive. Those cars are taking in TB of information each daily. Scale that to 10s of millions of cars. It's just not going to happen. Maybe a…

> Scale that to 10s of millions of cars. Don’t they currently have less than 1000 cars? I don’t think they will keep every recording forever but technically, they still could at the current scale.

That's still close to an Exabyte of data per year...

They have plans to grow 1000s of times this size.

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

#343

Post by cratermoon » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

returningfory2 wrote: post #6

cratermoon wrote: post #3

Waymo says Waymo is safe. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/woman-ge...

Tens of thousands of Americas are killed every year in car crashes. The existence of a case or some cases where a self-driving car caused injury has zero value. What matters is the rate of cases per mile driven.

What the discussion below is completely missing, and the point of my link to the incident involving dragging the pedestrian, is the incidence of harm to people not in a vehicle.

"The number of pedestrian deaths in the United States is skyrocketing. In 2022 traffic crashes killed 7,805 people on foot—that’s an 83 percent rise from 2009, and a 40-year high. The vast majority of those deaths involved a car colliding into a human"[1]

"Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars, according to Martin."[2]

The issue with the safety claims of self-driving is focusing on vehicle-to-vehicle interactions and failing to handle the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the environment. There are numerous stories of pathological behavior of self-driving vehicles when encountering simple environmental features that a human driver would handle without a second's hesitation[3]. Pedestrians, cyclists, people using mobility devices, and numerous other non-vehicle road users represent an unaddressed challenge to the safety claims made by Waymo and others.

1 https://slate.com/business/2024/10/cars-suvs-pedestrian-deat...

2 https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...

3 https://www.npr.org/2023/08/26/1195695051/driverless-cars-sa...

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

#344

Post by Ukv » Fri, May 02, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

suddenlybananas wrote: post #329

Ukv wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree that the US needs to invest far more in public transport.

I don't think that's mutually exclusive with Waymo working on their electric autonomous vehicles, nor that halting Waymo's testing would lead to greater access to public transport. Safer cleaner roads should hopefully even benefit busses, coaches, trams (and bikes) that have to share the road with cars - and the same self-driving technology can likely be adapted for use on public transport vehicles.

China, for instance, has extensive public transport in addition to a fast-growing autonomous vehicle sector. As useful and underutilized as trains are, there will likely still always be a non-negligible portion of transportation that road vehicles are just better suited for, which should be made as safe as possible.

There is also that it seems unfortunately difficult to get financial/political momentum behind building public transport in the US, whereas Waymo's services are something that's already happening and GP is implying should be stopped - which I feel flips the "Why not just" in terms of which is the course of least resistance (but, to be clear, we should definitely still be pushing for public transport).

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

#345

Post by BrandoElFollito » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

We don't have waymo in France and I am not sure it wrote work well.

Streets in France are full of entitled people. Drivers, bikers (both bikes with pedals and the ones with an engine) and pedestrians.

Everyone thinks that they have all the rights but ultimately some kind of order emerges from the chaos.

Pedestrians will walk on red lights, but are also careful.

Cars will park anywhere, but usually in a way that is just really frustrating but not blocking.

Bikes will slalom, but to a point.

This does not always work, but it is so much driven by culture that somehow we are statistically alive when moving outside.

Personally I hate it with all my heart. I dream of the dystopian world where everyone will follow the rules.

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

#346

Post by kfarr » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #293

Mawr wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and we should definitely leave deciding the appropriate speed to the drivers. Because, uh, throughput is important, got it. Is safety important? Who knows, but throughput definitely is!

That is what happens now. Most drivers do not cause accidents from speed most of the time. This is a red herring.

Speed is always a contributing cause to a collision. It's pretty simple to understand, if colliding parties are going slower, they would have more time to prevent collision.

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

#347

Post by lesuorac » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:17 PM UTC

rlue wrote: post #273

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…

The one time I ever rode in a waymo (in Los Angeles), I had a contradictory experience. My Waymo was attempting to make a right turn at a red light. We were stopped behind a human driver who was waiting for pedestrians to finish crossing before proceeding to make the turn. This was a college campus (UCLA), so there were lots of pedestrians. After a few seconds of waiting, the Waymo decided that the driver ahead of us…

I perhaps quarterly see this as a pedestrian with two human drivers.

I'll be happy when the average driver is a computer that does better than the average human. Deaths won't go down to 0 but at least it'll less chaotic.

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

#348

Post by lesuorac » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:20 PM UTC

ziddoap wrote: post #65

jmm5 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large companies with fleets of vehicles often self-insure.

Interesting! When I was much younger, I worked for a couple companies that had (what I would consider) large fleets of vehicles, and they all were insured through an insurance company. I guess I just assumed that's how it was. I wasn't aware self-insuring was a possibility. Thanks.

While I'm not sure of the specifics for car insurance.

For health care, a lot of large companies technically have say Anthem or whatever but the company pays out all of the claims and it's just administered by Anthem. So you may have seen a similar thing where all claims were handled by say Geico but it's not Geico's pot of money paying out claims.

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

#349

Post by vlovich123 » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:21 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #81

carlgreene wrote: post #10

This will surely get some skepticism as it's a Waymo study, but it's nice to see a real‐world dataset this large at 56M miles. An 85 % drop in serious‐injury crashes and 96 % fewer intersection collisions is a strong signal that Level 4 ADS can meaningfully improve safety in ride-hail settings. Still curious about how much of that comes from operational design versus the core autonomy, but it’s a big leap beyond “nov…

It's good to be skeptical of the source, but I can't remember seeing any substantive criticism of the methodology or conclusions.

I saw a Waymo completely freeze in road construction and then pull off into a different lanes through cones.

This is all low speed so wasn’t a safety issue (aside from road rage it might trigger in someone), but focusing only on safety also ignores incidents like this.

Aside from the criticisms about the safety methodology outlined in another chain, I think there’s a bait and switch here where they don’t talk about negative impacts to traffic, freezes, inability to handle situations and don’t evaluate their performance against other drivers.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Waymo is doing well to being the first to truly autonomous, but they’re intentionally putting their best foot forward and trying not to draw attention to any of their shortcomings.

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

#350

Post by gruez » Fri, May 02, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #324

SchemaLoad wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 legislatur…

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

>Muh freedum.

To be fair you have progressives arguing against red light cameras as well, on the basis that it's a regressive tax on poor people, and that it causes more accidents through drivers slamming on the brakes on a yellow.