Earlier quoted context omitted.
This always astounds me about cities who have a reputation for people breaking certain traffic laws. In St. Louis, people run red lights for 5+ seconds after it turns red, and no one seems to care to solve it, but if they'd just station police at some worst-offender lights for a couple months to write tickets, people would catch on pretty quickly that it's not worth the risk. I have similar thoughts on people using t…
In europe we use traffic cameras for this. Going through red light? A bill is in your mailbox automatically. No need for a whole police station.
Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
81–90 of 642 posts
Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#82It's fascinating seeing all the comments elsewhere anytime Waymo starts testing in another city along the lines of, "ah, but how will they handle X, Y, and Z here?? Checkmate, robots!" despite having already launched service in several other cities. Granted, NYC is the biggest city in the US, so maybe that sort of reaction is more reasonable there than when people in Dallas or Boston do it.
Since Waymo is very reliable in LA and SF, you will be just fine in NYC. Your grid system is far less of a challenge than the amount of hills, twists, narrow streets and low visibility back streets in California. I genuinely think the most complicated challenge for Waymo in NYC will be…winter snow and ice.
NYC is a new set of challenges. As you already mentioned snow and ice is new. But also missing the high density of people and cars per square area. Behavior of drivers and pedestrians are different and much less polite. I can see it working in NYC but "just fine" is a bit of an over confidence... at least not for the first few years before they learn to deal with these issues that they don't face yet in LA and SF.
Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#83Waymo should add a thin layer of "assertiveness" for actual deadlock that their self-driving architecture could cause. While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane. Thank God for th…
I find that in LA people routinely cut off the waymo or refuse to let it in. After all why not it is a robot, not someone who might legitimately harm you like a road rager. It also tends to fail the cultural left turns. That is, sending 2-3 cars left during yellow not just one like in other places. Seeing it stuck awkwardly in an intersection for another cycle from failing to make an assertive left turn is somewhat common.
Waymo also avoids certain challenging environments by excluding it from its service coverage, namely hilly neighborhoods.
Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#84I live in the bay and occasionally ride Waymo in SF and I pretty much always have a good time. I visited NYC a few weeks ago and was instantly reminded of how much the traffic fucking sucks :) While I was there I actually thought of Waymo and how they'd have to turn up the "aggression" slider up to 11 to get anything done there. I mean, could you imagine the audacity of actually not driving into an intersection when…
Each Waymo is equipped with multiple cameras (potentially LPR), LIDAR, etc. The car knows when the vehicles around it are breaking traffic laws and can provide photographic/video evidence of it. Imagine if Waymo cars started reporting violators to the police, and if the police started accepting those reports. Someday they might.
Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#85[deleted]
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Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in a Waymo in SF last weekend riding from the Richmond district to SOMA, and the car actually surprised me by accelerating through two yellow lights. It was exactly what I would have done. So it seems the cars are able to dial up the assertiveness when appropriate.
It doesn't seem impossible technically to up the assertiveness. The issue is the tradeoffs: you up the assertiveness, and increase the number of accidents by X%. Inevitably, that will contribute to some fatal crash. Does the decision maker want to be the one trying to justify to the jury knowingly causing an expected one more fatal incident in order to improve average fleet time to destination by 25%?
Reinforcement learning is a helluva drug. I'm sure by now Waymos can time yellows in SF to within a nanosecond, whereas humans will only ever drive through so many yellows will never get that much training data.
Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#87I live in the bay and occasionally ride Waymo in SF and I pretty much always have a good time. I visited NYC a few weeks ago and was instantly reminded of how much the traffic fucking sucks :) While I was there I actually thought of Waymo and how they'd have to turn up the "aggression" slider up to 11 to get anything done there. I mean, could you imagine the audacity of actually not driving into an intersection when…
My wife and I took a road trip that included time in SF last year and seeing a Waymo was pretty neat. To save some money, we stayed in downtown Oakland and took the BART into San Francisco. After getting ice cream at the Ghirardelli Chocolate shop, we were headed to Pier 39. My wife has a bad ankle and can't walk very far before needing a break to sit, and we could have taken another bus, we decided to take a Waymo f…
Why does tesla pretend to be autonomous? My friends with tesla fsd use it fully autonomously. It even finds a spot and parks for them.
Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#88I exclusively use Waymo in SF, even if it costs a bit more than Uber. You'll most often get a great human Uber driver, but there's a very real possibility that the person is a bad/unsafe driver or the ride is unpleasant for a myriad of other reasons. With a Waymo, you know exactly what you're buying.
Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#89It's fascinating seeing all the comments elsewhere anytime Waymo starts testing in another city along the lines of, "ah, but how will they handle X, Y, and Z here?? Checkmate, robots!" despite having already launched service in several other cities. Granted, NYC is the biggest city in the US, so maybe that sort of reaction is more reasonable there than when people in Dallas or Boston do it.
Since Waymo is very reliable in LA and SF, you will be just fine in NYC. Your grid system is far less of a challenge than the amount of hills, twists, narrow streets and low visibility back streets in California. I genuinely think the most complicated challenge for Waymo in NYC will be…winter snow and ice.
What snow and ice? We don't get much of that anymore.
That was actually the last thing I am worried about here. I really want to see how Waymo does with NYC drivers and obstacles(double parking on block where sometimes you have to pull in your mirrors just to get by(if you even take the chance instead of just laying on your horn). In some neighborhoods it can be so annoying.
Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
#90Waymo should add a thin layer of "assertiveness" for actual deadlock that their self-driving architecture could cause. While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane. Thank God for th…
I think we're going to see more examples of this as Waymo's popularity grows. Basically human drivers taking advantage of Waymo's far more passive driving style. Maybe some rules of the road will have to change, or the Waymos will get dedicated lanes to solve this problem.