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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

#351

Post by 0_____0 »

dylan604 wrote: post #130
Lammy wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

man, the Googs already has a library of images of you. If there's anything about you that the Googs doesn't already know, I'd be shocked. the Googs probably knows you better than your therapist, because you've only shared with your therapist what you wanted. the Googs gets data about you from places you know nothing about. being concerned that a Waymo car took your picture isn't invalid, but man is it a tear drop in…

When I met my ex and we linked over what was then Google+, we found that I had been auto labeled in a photo of a protest from years before we met. They've got a lot of info that they don't surface...

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

#352

Post by potato3732842 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #243
MattGrommes wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just following the letter of the law is so huge. Even people who think they're being nice by doing something out of the ordinary make the situation so much more dangerous because now you don't know what's going to happen. Even if they weren't great drivers, the consistency makes so much of a difference.

Oof yes. People who stop when they have the right of way and try to wave other drivers to go first just end up slowing everybody down.

There's some nuance to it. You're first at a light and a semi across from you is trying to take a left, the right thing to do is to wave him through rather than mat it when it turns green. You don't stop a line of traffic to be nice to someone who can take their own damn turn. As with everything else, people who don't Get It(TM) ruin it for everyone.

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

#353

Post by potato3732842 »

Mawr wrote: post #278
umbra07 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about when there's an idiot slightly ahead and in the next lane who decides to randomly swerve into my lane? do you also maintain a long following distance when there's a car right next to you in the next lane? I try to, because I don't want to stay in someone's blind spot, but sometimes it's not really possible to fall back.

I watch a lot of car accident videos and I've seen that happen exactly once. Perhaps you mean the far more common scenario when the car in the next lane simply decides to merge into yours? Nothing about that is random[1] and the response in 90%+ of cases is just to let off the gas for a few seconds. That's it. [1]: In most cases, it's because your lane is open and theirs is about to be backed up. You'd want to switch…

Because all the "person doesn't look, pulls out into road, other traffic swerves around them" don't cause crashes and don't get posted to your accident feed.

FFS, this is like selection bias 101.

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

#354

Post by nadis »

werrett wrote: post #152
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’m a fellow cyclist in SF and can only wholeheartedly second this. To add some extra anxiety, I’m usually riding a cargo bike, ferrying a child to or from daycare. I still remember the first time I went through a four-way stop intersection and saw a driverless car idling, waiting for its turn. It was weird and nerve-wracking. Now… I’d much prefer that to almost any other interaction at the same spot.

It's really interesting seeing all the comments from cyclists regarding Waymos. I currently live in a Waymo-less city and they weren't common enough in SF when I was biking there to be a big factor but I remember some harrowing moments with human drivers (without precious cargo - that sounds extra scary!). I'd be curious to try it again and am pleasantly surprised to hear it makes such a big difference!

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

#355

Post by ra7 »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #277
riquito wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather the study is comparing Waymo to accidents occurred in the same cities where Waymo operates, and my understanding is that Waymo drives 7 days a week, 24h a day in those cities, so same roads, same weather. Seems a legit comparison

Also there is some sort of bias not accounted for: People drive when most people drive and most people are stuck in the most dangerous area: traffic. Waymo driving at night on empty streets is not a good indicator for accident prevention when measured against the average human, who is stuck mostly in traffic.

Why do you believe Waymo's miles are from driving at night on empty streets? They drive when there's rideshare demand, a majority of which occurs during daytime and in the busiest areas of a city. They are no less stuck in traffic than the average human.

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

#356

Post by matthewdgreen »

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…

One night a few weeks ago I took a Waymo ride at night. Somewhere out in an unfamiliar neighborhoood, I realized that I hadn't seen a human being for dozens of blocks. The streets were full of cars, but every single one was an empty Waymo or Zoox. I spent the rest of the ride musing about what would happen if an armed mugger jumped in front of the car at the next traffic light, and the whole thing felt a little bit less safe.

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

#357

Post by ra7 »

manquer wrote: post #248
pb7 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymos drive in all weather in the cities they're deployed in; cities where people crash all the time in all types of weather.

Waymo ( and self driving programs as well) have been careful not to go for public large scale deployments in any city with difficult weather and for good reason focused on cities like Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, SF[1] so far with easy driving weather. There have been promising progress and there have been hints of a New York trial soon, but it it well known that self driving cars have not done large scale trial in…

They only compare to human accidents in the areas they operate. It doesn't matter where they don't operate today as they don't try to include human crash numbers from those cities either for the comparison.

Every time someone thinks this is some gotcha, but it isn't. Their methodology clearly attempts an apples-to-apples comparison.

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

#358

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

gruez wrote: post #350
hombre_fatal wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cameras are a regressive tax on poor people? That would be the tickets. You can correct this by having ticket penalties scale in proportion with wealth or income, which is something you probably want to do anyways so that they still act as a deterrent for people who are otherwise rich enough to flaunt traffic laws.

As for causing more accidents through slamming brakes on the yellow, I simply don't believe that. But if it helps you can extend the yellow duration by an extra half second.

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

#359

Post by Lammy »

bluGill wrote: post #300
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "the Googs" knows so much about me, why do they keep showing me ads for products I not only have zero interest in, I'm also not even the target demographic for?

Because they need to hide some of what they know about you. There have been cases where they (in this case target not google) knew a 14 year old was pregnant - but the ads for things she needed are sensitive. So the industry has learned everyone gets a few ads that don't apply just to give cover for those that do but someone doesn't admit to. also some ads really are to everyone. You may not be in a place where you w…

> Because they need to hide some of what they know about you.

My favorite example of this is in the desktop web version of Google Maps. If you search for some place and try to plot directions from “Your Location” it will prompt for the browser's Geolocation API and will refuse to give directions at all if you don't consent to the prompt: https://i.imgur.com/fIQswnD.png

This is despite the fact that it opens the map with a perfectly-centered and reasonably-sized window around my current location. I have never seen this fail when not using any sort of VPN that moves my GeoIP. They could totally give a reasonable mix–max time estimate based on that window just like the one they show for variable traffic.

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

#360

Post by dghlsakjg »

dheera wrote: post #77
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.

Dooring is so incredibly preventable with simple computer vision and some kind of actuator that adds an audible alarm and mechanical 3x resistance to the door opening when a cyclist is detected. The door should still be openable in emergency but should be hard to open until the cyclist passes. (For cars that have both a normally-used electronic door open button and a manual emergency release (e.g. Teslas), the electr…

You could just design infrastructure and road rules such that cyclists aren't encouraged/required to ride in the dooring zone, or even hold people accountable for their actions beyond just the cost of the damages they cause. Car based damages are so normalized that we allow reckless or negligent behavior around cars that we would never allow in any other part of our cities.
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