261–270 of 498 posts
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As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
Every time a city thinks flooding problems are fixed, nature invents a bigger storm
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That's the bit. For some reason trains come up on these threads all the time like it's some kind of gotcha alternative solution to driverless cars, forgetting that cars can go to your front door.
having a decent train system in a city can cut car ownership in half, it's a solved technology we've had for 100 years but pretty much no one builds it because it's not some private ownership tech hype bullshit
> because it's not some private ownership tech hype bullshit
I don't want to own a car, but I do want privacy, and I do want to go directly from point A to point B without being on a train. I have absolutely no reason to want to board a train as an alternative unless I want to go very fast from A to a very far away B. That is a real problem that is being solved for, not just hype. Aspiring to be cattle isn't noble.
EDIT: Also - rail doesn't get built because they're expensive projects, they take up a lot of space that people can't walk on, that cars can't drive on, that isn't useful to park housing or commerce near. Autonomous vehicles slot nicely into infrastructure that exists already, that already has the advantage of being point-to-point.
If the goal is "improve transit", autonomous vehicles achieve that without directly competing with trains. If the goal is, for some reason, "less cars", they also arguably achieve that because you'd end up with less private ownership of cars. If the goal is "no cars", I have no idea what the point of that would be.
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It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what's way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox. But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they'll be back without problems.
> It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets No one who works for them thought of flooded roads. That’s reassuring.
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A flooded road is a very predictable event, though.
Is it? I have been driving for 25 years and never encountered one. Waymo seems to accept they can’t predict everything so they built a system that’s safe enough to operate in the real world and learn from experience.
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SV is the most cloistered place I've ever seen. I'm comfortable assuming that nobody in any position of power at Waymo ever thought to themselves "gee maybe the weather is different in this new city we're deploying to, perhaps we should test that"
This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.
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This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.
Surely Waymo can afford a test track.
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This feels disingenuous to the extreme. Yes, chances are that some people will die run over by a Waymo. Put enough miles in one and someone will die eventually. Compare the numbers to human drivers. Would you, if they had LESS fatality rates than human drivers, say that the difference is "lives saved"? - I don't think you would. In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA!…
> In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!" That'll depend on the circumstances. If someone is killed because of a mistake a human wouldn't have made (like driving into oncoming traffic or down a light rail track) it'll be entirely their fault. Even if they do something humans sometimes do but never should like running a red light I'd argue…
For example, here’s a case where a human did it to avoid an ambulance:
https://www.click2houston.com/news/2012/09/18/10-injured-in-...
This guy says he was blinded by the sun:
https://kutv.com/news/local/trax-train-hits-vehicle-in-sandy
Sometimes people are drunk:
https://komonews.com/news/local/police-suspected-drunk-drive...
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Rain is one thing, but despite the rain Oregon is almost dead-last among all the states in terms of flood risk. It gets constant drizzles, not sporadic deluges.
This guy knows what he’s talking about. Born and raised in GA, it wasn’t until I moved to CA, the bay specifically, after college that I realized things like flood warnings multiple times a month and, flooded out roads during the summer weren’t just part of life lolll My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD” When Waymo came here and als…
So it makes sense to first rollout to a place with frequent, lighter rain - no? As an outsider, Waymo's approach seems to be solving challenges step-by-step, and the criticism in this thread is asking why it hasn't already solved the hardest cases.
> The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”
I wouldn't be surprised if Waymos are confidently driving into flooded roads because they "know" where the markings are without sensing the markings. Lidar-based GPS + SLAM are now very good at calculating location, as long as features like buildings or trees are still present.