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Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#251

Post by dymk »

abecedarius wrote: post #174
dymk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good public mass transit is absolutely superior. Waymo cars don't solve traffic, it only partly solves parking and paying a human. Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.

Most buses off rush hour are sparsely populated. Look up actual energy efficiency of American mass transit systems per rider mile. https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html Re traffic: with robot-driven cars, congestion pricing would be technically easy. This is an example of not considering possibilities created by the new tech.

Congestion pricing is congestion pricing because traffic is bad. Waymo doesn’t solve traffic.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#252

Post by gonehome »

xnx wrote: post #92
jeffbee wrote: post #48

The Waymo approach has proven itself. Targeted testing, running the driver in hard mode as much as possible, is better than the Tesla approach. Tesla’s plan was essentially “machine learning underpants gnomes”. Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ??? -> profit. Didn’t work and now Tesla is recognized as being dead last in the game, behind dozens of no-name Chinese players. Now what I wonde…

Not only that. Tesla thought they could do it (better!) with an inferior sensor suite.

The argument was more that to do it generally you need vision to work, lidar will always be a narrow solution and redundant when you have vision.

It might end up that solving the narrow city problem with high res maps is valuable enough to tackle anyway, but it could still be true that will never solve the general case.

Of course, it could be true that Tesla was be unable to solve it also. Though at some point attaching some general intelligence to vision can probably do it. Likely will be bigger issues then though.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#253

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dymk wrote: post #251
abecedarius wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most buses off rush hour are sparsely populated. Look up actual energy efficiency of American mass transit systems per rider mile. https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html Re traffic: with robot-driven cars, congestion pricing would be technically easy. This is an example of not considering possibilities created by the new tech.

Congestion pricing is congestion pricing because traffic is bad. Waymo doesn’t solve traffic.

Robo cars are more expensive during peak usage, so they can form habits where public transit is both encouraged because I took a robocalled to work and the bus home because then it was rush hour, or Vice versa. Or I took the bus to work and left late at night after the buses stopped running via a robo taxi…etc. All this occurs with Uber already, I don’t bother renting a car because even though it sucks to take the bus from the airport, I can Uber that and use more efficient transit when available, since I have something that fills in the gaps. Robo cars just make that link more efficient (lower cost eventually as humans become more and more expensive).

They make not taking your car with you a bit more feasible, and that’s a start at least.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#254

Post by stouset »

riffic wrote: post #221
crazygringo wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/tsvbh2y > U-ie n. > also U, U-ee, U-ey, U-turn, youie > (orig. Aus.) a U-turn; thus chuck/bang a U-ie, to make a U-turn.

always been partial to "flip a bitch" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flip_a_bitch

Thankfully this solves the spelling ambiguity!

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#255

Post by zamnos »

gonehome wrote: post #248
mustacheemperor wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope that I can get access in San Francisco soon. The closest grocery store to me in Bayview is a 30 minute walk across one of SF's riskiest pedestrian intersections and my neighborhood's only bus service is a corporate shuttle. Cruise just announced coverage for the "entire city" but it won't actually include my neighborhood. I've been well aware of Waymo for a long time, and been on the waiting list for ov…

Cruise’s “entire city” coverage is currently only for employees. The beta coverage is sunset to pacific heights and only 10pm to 530am - making it effectively useless.

More specifically, it excludes the night club district which is when the 10pm to 5am service time would actually be in demand.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#256

Post by stouset »

dymk wrote: post #169
abecedarius wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 20th-century mass transit system actually preferable to robocars once the technology is mature? My guess is it's the cities like Austin, planning new transit systems without designing for synergies with robocars, who are failing at urban planning.

Good public mass transit is absolutely superior. Waymo cars don't solve traffic, it only partly solves parking and paying a human. Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.

Not only don’t autonomous cars solve traffic, they will actively make it worse. The marginal cost of operating a car drops dramatically when you remove the human drivers from them (who also suffer from pesky conditions like boredom and drowsiness), and so we can expect these vehicles to drive signficantly more frequently than their human-operated cousins.

Think about uses like DoorDash. Instead of (in a city) walking to nearby restaurants, we now replace a larger share of those dinners with ones where cars are driving back and forth across the city to pick up the food and deliver it. This will only become more common when the cost drops by not having to pay a human being, and so we can expect a much greater volume of traffic from this one example use.

Other currently-marginal use cases will see equivalent growth due to the similar economics.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#257

Post by l33tc0de »

bdcravens wrote: post #240
amacneil wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> relatively small team 2,800 employees on Linkedin > instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0] Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV indu…

2,800 employees is small, when you consider what they are trying to accomplish. Tesla has 130k.

You do realize Tesla makes cars too, or are these 130K people working just on autonomous driving?

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#258

Post by petre »

kpw94 wrote: post #157
austinkhale wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The cars are very safe, very conservative drivers - The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell - You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely. - They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive - You get to play your own mus…

> The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell If they scale, that will become a problem: - people puking in car - people having sex in car - people eating greasy fries in car These happen in public transportation too (the sex one not as often, but puking, eating smelly/gross food definitely), but the big difference here is that users won't be anonymous. The next waymo rider (or waymo staff if the car…

Put a VOC sensor in the car and have a tireless robo voice educate the naughty occupants for the rest of the trip.

Muggers won't be an issue since it's complicated to get people's stuff out of the car through a broken window.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#259

Post by [deleted] »

arecurrence wrote: post #97
austinkhale wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The cars are very safe, very conservative drivers - The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell - You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely. - They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive - You get to play your own mus…

Does it prompt for a tip?

[deleted]

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#260

Post by bmelton »

StrictDabbler wrote: post #171
ajcp wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live downtown PHX (Roosevelt Row) and beyond riding in them I MUCH prefer them driving around on the streets than actual human drivers. There isn't a day goes by that I don't see drivers make up 4-way stops, disregard the 4-way stops, flip a youey in the middle of an intersection, etc. Contrast that to the ever predictable Weymo, just quietly going about their little self-driving existence. Only problem I've seen w…

I have never tried to spell the phrase "flip a youey" before. It might be the only word I use that I have never considered spelling, so I am grateful that you included it your comment. That said, I think you are wrong and it should be "uey", "uie," "u-ie," or any other spelling that emphasizes the "u" after which the term is named. Also "I do not know the answer but I am sure you are wrong" is the most internetish co…

> I have never tried to spell the phrase "flip a youey" before.

As a former Scripps spelling bee contestant, I've developed a low-grade allergy to commonplace onomotopeic words with no obvious, agreed-upon spelling. Recently I struggled with zhuzh (which has the bonus terror of having an alternate spelling, 'zhoosh') - but I commend OP for having chosen a phonetically parseable spelling over one of your (arguably more appropriate) choices, as I suspect it would have taken a lot longer to divine meaning from.

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