Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were a leading cause of death when they were a common mode of transport. Riding a horse is very dangerous. Its just regarded as an acceptable risk (its something many people encourage kids to do) for cultural and social reasons. A British government scientific advisor was fired for pointing out that riding a horse carries about 30 times the risk of a "serious adverse effect" as taking ecstasy.
>A British government scientific advisor was fired for pointing out that riding a horse carries about 30 times the risk of a "serious adverse effect" as taking ecstasy. Could we have a link for this one please?
A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
421–430 of 497 posts
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Try using a unit per person Not relevant when we’re comparing project costs. OP argued we should devote self-driving resources to public transit. I’m arguing that’s nonsense. > roads are still public infrastructure that has to be paid for and maintained Sure. But that isn’t a new funding commitment. Cancelling Waymo won’t reduce our road costs.
>OP argued we should devote self-driving resources to public transit. Yes, because it would allow moving people more cost-effectively (among other things) - which is measured per person per unit distance traveled. (I'm not OP, but nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself.)
> because it would allow moving people more cost-effectively (among other things)
Add last-mile and model for the real American population distribution. Not an imagined America where everyone lives on Manhattan.
Not all miles travelled are equal. In value, urgency or desirability and thus price willing to be paid. Complaining about self driving cars is asinine. The scales are wrong. The problems are wrong. The places are wrong.
> nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself
I mean, exactly. We’re urbanising without commensurate increases in public transit. Deployment or use. Perhaps that hints at a change being in order.
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would a self driving car need to park? The ability to always be in use is one of the advantages. They are not going to be always in use. Unless you got a perfectly uniform distribution of demand over time, eventually most of these cars will have to be parked somewhere. And whey they do, let's hope they don't keep doing this: https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/c2977546-lot-full-of-self-drivi...
Ok but they only need one parking space and even it can be time shared. They don’t need the same parking infrastructure we have now. Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance. Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.
> They don’t need the same parking infrastructure we have now.
The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist. People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.
> Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance
Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.
> Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.
Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first Waymo has raised about $11bn [1]. That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3]. These things aren't competing. To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency, it's not a good look for American public transit. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10…
>That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3]. Bakersfield to Merced is 171 miles of intercity high-speed rail. It's unclear to me why Californians need to make such trips with any significant frequency, and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit". 22 years ago in Toronto, the Sheppard line (3.4 mi, underground) was built for less…
But the Bakersfield/Merced HSR line is an actual project, estimated at over $30B (it makes no sense independently but is part of LA-to-SF).
You seem to be comparing an actual, private tech project to what you wished public transit looked like, not what it actually looks like.
Public transit is awesome, but construction costs in the anglophone world are bananas (https://transitcosts.com/).
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like the Borg, every Waymo is the same driver. So in column A, the insurance company has a meta-driver with many millions of miles of statistics. In column B, we have slow-reaction and non-lidar-equipped you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago.
> you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago This is factually wrong: I did not.
I apologize if I gave the impression that I had personal knowledge of your driving record and traffic violations spanning over the last 36 months. I assure you, my intent in using the word "you" was merely to illustrate a general situation in which an individual (though surely not yourself, palata, specifically), will find themselves being penalized for a prior incident. As my comment was surely read by thousands of HN readers, one imagines that as each of them read the word "you", they pondered their own driving history in their lived experience.
Now that we have established the fact that you, palata, did not have a speeding ticket 3 years ago, I would encourage you to think about the application of my statement, to your actual situation. That is, you may substitute the words "speeding ticket 3 years ago" with any traffic violation or insurance claim where you were determined to be at fault, over any time period which might not be 3 years. Then the question is raised of whether you, palata, would incur higher insurance costs than Waymo.
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are starting to seem dishonest when you resort to outliers and present them as the baseline. > To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency We can not. This logic is stupid. This logic will take you to the idea that the best thing to do is to get everyone a helicopter because helipads are cheap to build and it costs zero dollars to "build roads in the sky". Yeah, you are right. These things are not com…
> Self-driving cars or not, the US is still going to be an expensive, inefficient country that can boast about its amazing economy, yet most people living there are at third-world country levels of development For fuck’s sake, the world’s largest rail system and navigable waterways say hello. I’ve advocated for public transit. But it’s turning into zealotry when an $11bn project showing actual gains is turned into a…
If Waymo/Google/Alphabet really cares about people's safety and this is nothing but a pet project where the amount raised ($11bn) in 15 years is ~3% of their whole revenue in 2023, they wouldn't mind open sourcing their whole system, including for other commercial ventures.
Until then, the whole thing is nothing but a Trojan horse to let encroach themselves even more into another aspect of our lives.
Also:
> world’s largest rail system
The world's largest freight rail system.
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they don't disappear even with half the non-illegal vehicles being autonomous — some crashes also happen due to avoidance manoeuvres. So the fairer comparison would be to say that if existing SDVs were instead being driven by human drivers, we would have seen ~60 property claims more and ~40 bodily injury claims more (forgot the exact numbers from the paper), which is what, like 0.1% improvement in claims ove…
But.. they would disappear? Not all of course. But some drive under the influence because there is no other convenient way to get home after a night out. And Waymo solves that! And they are highly aware of their "small number statistics", they literally provide uncertainty ranges. For both SDVs and HDVs. And their values are consistent with increasing data. I.e. they ~only get smaller uncertainties but no significant…
Are you suggesting Waymo would become available where cabs aren't due to economics, or that Waymo-like technology in privately owned vehicles would solve that? Because I wouldn't buy the former, but I can see how the latter would, yet we are far away from that.
I am not referring only to "small number statistics", but to obvious miscomparisons. We don't want SDVs to beat "average human driver", because average is worsened by impaired humans — we need them to "beat" at least an average, non-impaired human. Going by the numbers alone, they would achieve that too, but not by the same amount.
But more importantly, we need them to compare both in identical driving conditions, which is where most of my complaint really is. Unless Waymo has driven in the same amount (proportionally) of rush-hour traffic, road-works, risky-drivers-around conditions, parking into tight spots and garages... of miles out of their 25M miles as their human counterparts, we could very well be looking into Waymo-in-simpler-situations vs humans-in-all-situations. And the numbers would be meaningless, which to me they seem they are.
And it is important that they have achieved similar success with 6x the miles, but they need to account for more challenging conditions. And while some tricks can work while they are in small numbers (eg. avoiding road works by re-routing), it will lead to congestion elsewhere when such technology dominates the traffic.
I would also note that it is impressive, regardless of the conditions they operated in, that they were involved in exactly 2 "bodily injury" claims over those 25M miles, and both of those appear not to have been the fault of Waymo.
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
The NASA space pen story as you call it is a nice quip. It's also a complete lie. The Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets. Pencil cores are made of graphite, when you write with it, small bits of graphite break off. On land it just falls down, but in space it floats around and attaches to things. Graphite conducts electricity and it caused countless sho…
> Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets Note, too, that NASA didn't pay to develop the pen. Fisher did. > If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)
Why the pop quiz? You’re not my professor, or even my TA. Just say what you mean.
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#429This sounds quite a bit like massaging statistics until you get the numbers you like. A few things that pop to mind: did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive (under the influence, no valid driving permit, cars with issues [braking broken]...)? (This mostly matters for evaluating the average performance compared to average non-impaired human — a drunk person might mess up with self-driving vehicle sensors…
> did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive I don't think we can discount people who aren't fit/eligible to drive _if they still drove_. They might not have a _legal_ right to be on the road, but they are still on the road.
It depends on how you want to measure your safety when driven in one of these?
Do you want them to beat a drunk driver, or an average, non-impaired human? If you got into a cab and cab driver was obviously drunk, would you ride along or get out asap?
By "letting" them compare to an "average" (skewed by impaired drivers' incidents), we are letting them appear much better than an average, non-impaired driver, whereas they might be, or might not be (numbers clearly suggest they'd still beat them, but not by this much).
Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok but they only need one parking space and even it can be time shared. They don’t need the same parking infrastructure we have now. Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance. Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.
> They don’t need the same parking infrastructure we have now. The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist. People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership. > Buses also n…
> The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist.
Why would the existing infrastructure not continue to change? We are redeveloping parking lots today. Car and ride shares did reduce parking needs.
> People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.
Building codes for parking spaces are constantly changing here and consider transit availability and car ownership. If self-driving vehicles (including expanded public transit) are available that will further reduce the requirements.
Self-driving vehicles (even cars) put downward pressure on parking needs.
> Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.
Why are you so obsessed with the car form factor? I don’t see how a robotaxi needs any more parking than a taxi. A self-driving bus needs as much space as a conventional bus today.
> Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.
That’s not how busses, taxis or Ubers work. Ubers are not dispatched from a hub on every call. Demand is predicted and capacity is dispatched accordingly. As demand goes up dispatched capacity utilization goes up. More vehicles can be dispatched when demand approaches dispatched capacity.
This problem is the same no matter what form the driver takes. Taxis, ride shares, and busses already do capacity planning. Robot drivers just remove the human driver complexity from the equation.
Robotaxis (like busses and taxis) can use denser parking structures in their depots because they don’t have to deal with the limitations of the public, or even humans.