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Waymo in Dallas

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Re: Waymo in Dallas

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas

Right now the average car occupancy during the rush hour is ~1.5 persons per car. By increasing that to 3-4 people, you can easily double the effective road capacity. This will completely resolve the congestion in the majority of metro areas, even with induced traffic. No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's…

I'm not buying that a significant number of people would switch from their individual car to a self-driving car pool. One of the main advantages of a Waymo over a Lyft to me is that there is no driver. If we now fill the car with random people I'd rather drive my own car.

It's also not clear to me why routing self-driving cars would be more efficient than what Lyft Line did which ended up super slow. The slowness want just the additional route but also other passengers getting in and out and in some cases waiting for them.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I went to the link they gave and to the safety section and it says: > As of July 23, 2026, we have temporarily removed our safety analysis from this report, as well as relevant references to the analysis throughout the report (denoted in-text by a reference to this section). We were made aware of data discrepancies between City agency data for New York City for-hire vehicle crashes with serious injuries…

I think it’s not surprising that a report written by a forthrightly anti-car public interest group managed to screw that up: https://www.openplans.org/who-we-are

I had never heard of them. But anybody can make a mistake and it shows integrity to immediately remove a section with a disclaimer when prevented with contrary evidence. Not enough folks do this.

You can have strong anti- "car-culture" views and still be committed to the truth.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#403

> Dallasites Is that seriously the demonym? Terrible. Try harder, Dallasites.

What's your better suggestion? Dallasonian? Dallaser? Dallasan? Also, do you have the same issue with the demonyms Manhattanite or Seattleite?

If I had my wish, the original French hippie colony would have been successful and we would be calling ourselves Reunionais or something like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Réunion_(Dallas)

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#404
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://gizmodo.com/waymos-driverless-cars-revealed-to-be-na...

Did you read your article? > Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order. Waymo is no more required to turn over data to the government than you are.

[deleted]

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas

> How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly. The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of a…

> Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappenit's odd, you'd think they'd all try to be ahead at the apex

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#406

I was talking with someone visiting from Florida the other day and they were talking about how Waymo is slurping money that would have otherwise stayed in the local economy. E.g. you pay an uber driver, the uber driver pays the grocery store, etc. This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean…

There is some need for local labor, but it’s an order of magnitude lower than the number of Uber drivers that get paid.

I never thought of this, but I think this is a valid concern. Uber drivers will end up spending in their locality while money that goes to Waymo will be used for further investment that’s probably concentrated in the Bay Area. I will say this though, Uber it self somehow takes > 50% of the cut a driver and makes and once again spends it on engineers in California, so Uber is guilty of this same issue, but Waymo is probably worse at this than Uber.

In general AI is guilty of destroying the demand for normal human labour and accumulating money into companies with highly paid engineers.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#407
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also covered in cameras the police have access to, which have been used to track down legal protestors in the past. That's why there was a spate of people setting them on fire a few months ago. Basically, every Waymo car is a Flock camera.

Stop spreading FUD. The police do not in any meaningful way "have access" to Waymo cameras. They can subpoena recordings and Waymo will call the cops on you if you commit a crime in one of their cars, but your statement implies Flock-like access which the police simply don't have.

More broadly, do you believe that Google is not, in some way, adding Waymo data to the surveillance or intelligence product catalog the US government already purchases from them?

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#408
post #313

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport

So the DFW metroplex is an example of why it's difficult to build decent public transportation - it has a population of about half that of Greater London, covering over 24k square kilometers. Very few people work in the downtown areas. Most people live in a suburb and work in a suburb.

I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble.

All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even.

Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also can't do inter-city train trips in most of the US either. Inter-city autonomous car trips will almost certainly happen before the trains arrive.

You think we will have Waymo between Bakersfield and Merced before 2033? That is a bit optimistic I would say.

One could say the same about the train.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#410
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Open to All Y'all"

Isn't there supposed to be a liaison in there? "Open to Alls Y'all"

Here’s my understanding as a native Texan with examples (don’t take this too seriously):

Y’all -> group of people (howdy yall)

All y’all -> everyone (all yall need to listen up!)

All’s yall -> only thing (alls yall need is another beer)

All y’all’s -> singular possessive of everyone’s stuff (put all y’all’s shit away)

All’s y’all’s -> plural possessive of everyone’s stuff (alls y’all’s cars are blocking me in). This one is a bit awkward and most people just use all y’all’s instead

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