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San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

washingtonpost.com

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Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#21

Post by spaceman_2020 »

malermeister wrote: post #3

Individual motorized transport is a dead end, especially in cities, no matter if it has a driver or not. It's just inherently energy- and space efficient to haul around a two ton piece of junk per 80kg person. Cities don't have the space, the planet doesn't have the energy to support it. We need to ban cars from cities in the longer term, both human- and AI-driven. For now, we need to take steps to get there. Reduce…

…and hope that climate change makes the weather nice enough for bikes and walking all the year round!

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#22

Post by LeafItAlone »

mynonameaccount wrote: post #14

what if a thug stayed in the car an robbed every new rider? What if the homeless camped in the car?

Why couldn’t it drive that person to a police station for the criminal or a suitable place for the homeless person? Certainly they detect when anybody is in the car.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#23

Post by skepticATX »

jseliger wrote: post #5

I think this is just complacency and a bias towards how things are; imagine a world in which biking is safe, pedestrians are safe, and huge amounts of the city don't have to be devoted to parking. That's what 24/7 driverless cars can enable.

Why will self driving cars enable this though? It seems to me that an equally plausible outcome is that we move even further towards cities built solely around the car.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#24

Post by the_snooze »

mynonameaccount wrote: post #14

what if a thug stayed in the car an robbed every new rider? What if the homeless camped in the car?

The first night these are driving around, a homeless person or a drugged up techbro will turn a car into an expensive autonomous outhouse.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#25

Post by DaveJorg »

mynonameaccount wrote: post #14

what if a thug stayed in the car an robbed every new rider? What if the homeless camped in the car?

Good point, valid concern. It’s assumed you need to pay to enter the vehicle and this is tied to your credit card. Could the system be setup so you are charged until you exit the vehicle and your trip doesn’t end until you do? Cameras or presence sensors could detect when the occupant enters or leaves the vehicle.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#26

Post by supermatt »

They should simply be held to the same standard as any other road user. Whoever is ultimately responsible for these cars should also be responsible for the traffic offenses. Prosecute them. Revoke their drivers license. Impound the vehicles.

Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#27

Post by malermeister »

chpatrick wrote: post #10
malermeister wrote: post #3

Individual motorized transport is a dead end, especially in cities, no matter if it has a driver or not. It's just inherently energy- and space efficient to haul around a two ton piece of junk per 80kg person. Cities don't have the space, the planet doesn't have the energy to support it. We need to ban cars from cities in the longer term, both human- and AI-driven. For now, we need to take steps to get there. Reduce…

I think that ship sailed in many parts of the US when cities were built around cars.

US cities weren't built around cars, they were bulldozed for them.

https://historydaily.org/america-streets-before-cars

We can undo the damage.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#28

Post by mlyle »

MostlyStable wrote: post #15

It's entirely possible that this tech isn't yet ready for an expansion, but this article does a shit job of demonstrating that. The alternative is not perfect drivers. The alternative is real human drivers who make all kinds of mistakes every day. I completely believe that these incidents are real, but without comparison to the actual alternative, it's useless information.

My guess is that the self-driving cars are a bit safer against injury/death per mile (we don't have enough data to know either way), but make stupid mistakes that inconvenience emergency services a lot more.

But we don't know how to make human drivers any better, and self-driving cars are steadily improving (even if that's slowing down a little).

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#29

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #19
malermeister wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this world, we'll still have giant hunks of steel zooming around our cities, creating noise, taking up space and wasting energy to move themselves around (the payload to weight ratio of cars is abysmal). We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.

What do you suggest people do when the weather isn’t quite as nice? Where I live, it gets so brutally hot and humid in the summer that people literally collapse and die if they do anything much outdoors.

San Francisco is not like that though. that's the whole point of the article. They could also take transit.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#30

Post by LeafItAlone »

That first paragraph sounds _exactly_ like what I’ve seen human drivers do. All of the incidents in the article are.

Sure, wet should strive for bettering the situation with automated technology, but it’s not like this is worsening the status quo.

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