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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

#141

Post by bluGill »

AIPedant wrote: post #7
floxy wrote: post #2

That's great news. I wonder how much insurance rates will go down when autonomous vehicles get popular. Seems like the liability portion could go way down.

The problem is that Waymos can't replace cars (or even Ubers!) since they depend on human oversight and problem-solving. Even at a 20:1 ratio it is not feasible for autonomous vehicles to employ 10m people to account for every American on the road.

How does oversight handle issue. They are not remote driving, but what are they doing. The more important question is can the car have me (who is already inside it) tell it what to do?

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

#142

Post by enragedcacti »

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 probably design the latch jaws to have an electronically controlled second catch. It would activate whenever a cyclist is present so if someone tries to slam the door open it would catch with the door slightly open and trigger a warning. A second pull then opens the door no matter what for safety.

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

#143

Post by kajecounterhack »

ra7 wrote: post #96
dheera wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Waymo already warns you if it detects road users when you open a door. They just don't actively prevent you from opening the door, but they could implement it in their next generation vehicles.

They won't have to if they use sliding power doors (the geely cars have them). They should have had them for the jaguar generation :)

Dooring people aside, what do you do if someone just leaves the door open when they leave their ride?!

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

#144

Post by bluGill »

Flatcircle wrote: post #84

reminder that if waymo type cars replaced human driven cars and cut the deaths to zero. (perhaps a big if) Then it'd be like finding a cure for cancer, for people aged 0 - 40, who die as much in auto accidents as they do of cancer

Even if they don't cut deaths to zero, they can still make a big difference. Humans are terrible drivers.

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

#145

Post by akavi »

VOIPThrowaway wrote: post #87
biophysboy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also hopeful that Waymo has other positive externalities for bikes/pedestrians: less need for parking spots, car ownership, etc. At the same time, I guess you could say the same for rideshare, so it would depend on if robo-rideshare is cheaper than ownership

My prediction is that car usage will go thought the roof when AI cars work. People can have a stress-free commute to a nice house in the countryside and work in the cities. Because the car is electric, it will be inexpensive to run.

I sincerely believe this thesis and desperately want a REIT that owns real estate in a 2 hour radius of major urban downtowns.

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

#147

Post by bluGill »

stefan_ wrote: post #42
returningfory2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reason they investigate every airplane crash for a root cause is not necessarily because the number of deaths tilts the statistics, it's because they are highly complicated mechanical and electrical machines where there is always the chance for a systematic fault that will doom many further planes if not found and rectified. The same of course applies to self-driving cars; they are literally cars driven by softwa…

The real shame is we don't investigate normal human drivers the same way.

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

#148

Post by 6510 »

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…

It's probably measuring the temperature of your bodily fluids.

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

#149

Post by sneak »

wffurr wrote: post #31
kfarr wrote: post #19

This is great and there’s another area of influence that I’ve heard other traffic engineers discuss: platoon pacing. A platoon is the word that traffic engineers give to a group of cars traveling together. A platoon is most explicitly visible on a corridor with signals timed for a green wave, but occurs in many other contexts. Human drivers often race when in a platoon— not even on purpose it’s just an instinct to go…

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.)

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

#150

Post by manquer »

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.

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 optimal conditions for self driving to average conditions for humans.

Even if waymo was better when accounting for these factors , if it was much worse in the conditions humans typically are expected to drive [1] they self driving is still less safe than humans on average .

A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group .

[1] no study will ever show this as they wouldn’t be able to trial it under those conditions if it is not safe enough

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