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Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

cnbc.com

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Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#441

Post by dgunay »

testfrequency wrote: post #134
bytemut wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC is a new set of challenges. As you already mentioned snow and ice is new. But also missing the high density of people and cars per square area. Behavior of drivers and pedestrians are different and much less polite. I can see it working in NYC but "just fine" is a bit of an over confidence... at least not for the first few years before they learn to deal with these issues that they don't face yet in LA and SF.

We do have narrow streets in LA with double parked cars, cars parked in the street only allowing one car through the middle at a time, and plenty of construction closures and obstacles. Why do so many NYC people think there’s comically no cars in LA or neighborhood streets? Also, I can assure you LA drivers are a tad bit more aggressive than NYC drivers (less honking and flicking off though, LA people are more a driv…

Having driven in both LA and NYC+NJ, LA drivers feel almost serenely calm to me most of the time.

In LA, as long as you don't do anything obviously stupid and give plenty of room for people to see you coming, people will just chill and leave you be. Every now and then I will see someone do something unfathomably crazy though.

In NYC (NJ especially), this didn't work. I had to be actively psychologically manipulating other drivers in order to get even a simple lane change done. Make the other guy think he won by signaling earlier than normal so he'll gun it sooner and leave space behind him, or don't signal until I'm halfway into the lane already.

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#442

Post by potato3732842 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #192
joecool1029 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a pilot program in NJ for them, they were universally hated. People would slam brakes on and be hanging over the edge into intersection and throw their car into reverse panicking to avoid the ticket, ended up causing a ton of new accidents so the program was never continued. In newark people shot at the cameras: https://www.nj.com/news/2012/08/shoot_out_the_red_lights_2_t...

Thankfully sawzalls are cheap and plentiful so people can use much safer practices to disable/remove them: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/parkside-drive-speed-...

I bet if you come back after they've removed the old one but before they install the new one you can wreck the threads on the threaded anchors by impacting the wrong size higher grade nut on.

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#443

Post by potato3732842 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #297
lysace wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden: Their locations are public. There is even an official API. They are mostly located in sane places. Apps like Waze consume this API and warn drivers if they’re at risk of getting caught. It’s the deterrence/slowdown at known risky spots they’re after, not the fine, I guess. I heard that apps warning drivers this way are illegal in Germany?

Aside: what's up with the traffic speed cameras in Sweden? It feels like they're not designed to catch anybody. In my recent drive there it seemed like most of the cameras were in an 80 zone just before it switch to 50 for a tiny town. They wouldn't catch a typical driver who does something like 10 over everywhere -- they would likely have already started slowing down for the 50. In my city in Canada, that camera wou…

Because the point is to slow the traffic down, not to extract revenue from the peasantry.

Same as the difference between an obvious speed trap and a "gotcha" speed trap.

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#444

Post by bradleyjg »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #350
jonahx wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Miami, there is very little enforcement and reckless driving flourishes. I used to regularly see cars doing 90, weaving, pass cops who did nothing. I've also talked to multiple cops who confirmed that they rarely enforce unless specifically doing traffic duty. Which never made sense to me, since it's a revenue stream. But however the incentives are set up, they motivate cops to do nothing, and drivers know it.

Maybe it's only one part of an overall trend in cultural rot around rule enforcement. A woman had her dog in the cart at Costco that kept barking at people. I joked with an employee during check-out "So anyone can bring their dog to the store these days?" and she said they stopped confronting these people because it's not worth it and makes things worse. Worse for who? Man, I thought that was the exact type of person…

The woman is going to claim it’s a service animal. There’s no real rules about service animals—-and even where there are rules, like with learning disabilities, doctors and other professionals act like whores and sell their signatures to anyone with money. It’s widespread bad parenting for generations now. How can a store fight that?

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#445

Post by enricozb »

crazygringo wrote: post #270
enricozb wrote: post #193

NYC is so dense it could be a bikers' paradise in the US. Why are we supporting even more car infrastructure :/

Because half the year it's freezing cold or blistering hot? With CitiBike and so many bike lanes it basically already is a biker's paradise. Obviously there could be lots more improvements, but the people who want to bike already do.

I doubt that people who bike their kids in baskets daily in Amsterdam would do the same in NYC, given how dangerous it is. The risk tolerance required to bike in NYC is much higher.

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#446

Post by rib3ye »

throwaway0123_5 wrote: post #355
afcool83 wrote: post #239

I live in one of the areas they are actively testing/training in. Their cars consistently behave better and more safely than most human drivers that I’m forced to share the road with. As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.

> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road. I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging. The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't we…

Don't you think it would be easier and cheaper to gatekeep than to build up an enforcement and judgement workforce.

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#447

Post by raldi »

fsaid wrote: post #75

Waymo should add a thin layer of "assertiveness" for actual deadlock that their self-driving architecture could cause. While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane. Thank God for th…

What does it mean to “merge into a lane going into the opposite direction”?

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#448

Post by paulnpace »

While driving a car, it is possible to do something, even on accident, that can land a person in jail. These crimes do not have the option of paying a fine in lieu of prison time.

A "self-driving" car can cause the same accident but gain advantages over a human driver that the person ultimately responsible is no longer held to the same set of laws.

This seems to undermine foundations of law, placing the owners of those assets into a different legal category from the rest of us.

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#449

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

dbg31415 wrote: post #431
throwaway0123_5 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road. I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging. The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't we…

> I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging. For your system to work, there would actually need to be cops watching traffic. Since the pandemic, some cities just don't have as many police watching the streets as they used to. For example, there is virtually no traffic enforcement in Austin now. You see the results with h…

If only there were other ways of tracking and observing vehicle behavior. And some reliable way of identifying vehicles themselves. Or ways that we could automate this with computers to sort through.

But that's just science fiction. Cars are just going to be cars!

Re: Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

#450

Post by jerlam »

lenerdenator wrote: post #345
ilamont wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic enforcement, which used to correct some bad driving, has basically evaporated in many parts of the U.S. This has been a long-term trend. A friend who's a cop told me that only when their department got specific state grants would they set up stings of drivers driving in a pedestrian walkway while someone was crossing the street. Here's an example of one such grant program, which is actually funded by the fede…

> The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost. Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant. This isn't as much of…

NYC seems to have a problem collecting those fines too. Some drivers wrack up hundreds of tickets every year and simply don't pay:

https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/new-yorks-most-dangerous-d...

Apparently the tickets don't incur any penalties against a driver's license, so these drivers don't face repercussions such as suspension.

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