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Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

sfgate.com

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Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#481

Post by agos »

godelski wrote: post #461
littlestymaar wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why you should be suspicious when anyone discusses averages I like to say that the average human being has one testicle and half a vagina, which is not very representative of anyone around. > On that note, the median and average are always within one standard deviation of another Oh really? That's cool.

Haha yeah that is accurate. The right language is situational though haha. People are generally overconfident in their ability to mathematically describe things. There's a clique "all models are wrong" and like all cliques it is something everyone can repeat but not internalize lol

you should not forget the second part: all models are wrong, some are useful

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#482

Post by SllX »

smt88 wrote: post #445
darkwizard42 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the regulators (who are indirectly appointed through the public) are allowing them to use govt-built roads to test their products. They don't have a direct obligation to you or any other citizen. I'd like them to release the video, but just be clear what you want, and best not to act like it is required of them.

The roads belong to taxpayers, not regulators. The regulators are supposed to work for us. Anyway, I'm talking about a moral or PR obligation, not a legal one. Waymo is using roads that taxpayers pay for, and that raises the bar for transparency for them.

You would think so but no. Roads and highways belong to the State or Federal government (basically whoever built the damn thing).

States and the Federal government are managed by an Elected government and their appointees, and are empowered to levy taxes.

Taxpayers foot the bill, and some taxpayers are even citizens with the right to vote in elections.

The whole “X belongs to the taxpayer” is crap rhetoric you and many many many Americans were raised on, but which does not accurately convey anything about your relationship with the roads and highways you use. We pay for them, we elect the people who are charged with managing the entity that does own them and employs people to build and maintain them, but we do not own them.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#483

Post by billjings »

ruuda wrote: post #394

Everybody here is discussing the car and the cyclist, but I don't see anybody considering the possibility that the intersection design is unsafe. That there is a stop sign is a pretty bad signal in itself, Not Just Bikes made a video explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42oQN7fy_eM

It's a low traffic 4 way stop sign intersection. Low speed, probably a 25mph speed limit?

If you're cycling, this kind of intersection is only dangerous if you fail to yield/stop appropriately to auto traffic. Which seems like might be what happened here, from the description.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#484

Post by TeMPOraL »

sschueller wrote: post #473
ruuda wrote: post #394

Everybody here is discussing the car and the cyclist, but I don't see anybody considering the possibility that the intersection design is unsafe. That there is a stop sign is a pretty bad signal in itself, Not Just Bikes made a video explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42oQN7fy_eM

Self driving cars are a misguided attempt to make driving safer when the underlying issue isn't necessarily the driver.

They are not misguided. They are not there yet, but progressing steadily.

There is nothing misguided in switching out a human for a machine that can do a job better, while keeping the job unchanged. Iterative improvement is the only thing anything ever gets done, and yes, that means we might first need to get drivers out of the streets before we're able to make more substantial redesign of the transportation fabric.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#485

Post by agos »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #463
maxwellg wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insisting that a bicycle needs to follow the same procedures as a 3000lb internal combustion engine driven vehicle is madness. The vast majority of car laws are completely inappropriate for bicycles. Bicycles are much smaller, go much slower, can stop much faster, etc.

Then ride in dedicated bike lanes, but don't make up excuses why you should break the laws just because they are inconvenient to you.

confine the bikes to the bike lanes, then don't build bike lanes (or build awful ones) and finally you'll be free of those pesky bikes! finally the cars will have the road all by themselves.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#486

Post by dns_snek »

resolutebat wrote: post #455
hot_gril wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I know that my odds are different from the average.

So are you one of the 88% who know they are better than average, or one of the 12% who are worse? https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-driver...

This has nothing to do with being "a better driver" than average. If you simply don't drive while intoxicated, extremely tired, or distracted with your gadgets, you're already beating the average when it comes to collisions and injuries.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#487

Post by bagels »

stronglikedan wrote: post #151
bagels wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No lies in the article. "The bill now heads to Governor Newsom's desk" ... where it was vetoed, sadly.

> where it was vetoed, sadly Sounds like the gov did the right thing. Cyclists shouldn't get special privileges. They're operating a vehicle on the roadway just like everyone else. Drivers of other types of vehicles shouldn't also have to remember special rules just for cyclists.

There are restrictions on where bicycles can be ridden that don't apply to cars. Should we get rid of those laws too?

Let's also get rid of the lower speed limits for 18 wheelers, and weight limits on bridges. Why should passenger vehicles have all the fun?

How about lane splitting for passenger vehicles, just like motorcycles get to do?

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#488

Post by TeMPOraL »

eurleif wrote: post #401
resolutebat wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a classic is-ought fallacy here. Drunk, high, sleep deprived or "crazy wild aggressive reckless" human drivers ought not to exist, but they do, and thus it's absolutely fair to compared autonomous drivers against them.

If GP's mother switches from driving for herself to having Waymo drive for her, her risk of injury will increase . Therefore, if her goal is to avoid injury, it would be counterproductive for her to make that switch. That conclusion does not require any is-ought fallacy.

All self driving > Reckless drivers only self-driving > current situation > small random population only self-driving > GGPs-mom-likes only self-driving.

Unfortunately, identifying people like GGP's mother and excluding them from requirement for self-driving is prohibitively expensive (and icky in all kinds of ways), and so would be predicting reckless driving behavior (approximately every driver is reckless at some point anyway, GGP's mom included). So it's all self-driving or no self-driving, and all self-driving is strictly better for all of us, even if GGP's mom has to briefly accept slightly elevated risk.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#489

Post by cgriswald »

viraptor wrote: post #365
petre wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a recent accident that happened in my country, a human driver swerved to avoid a cyclist that was quickly switching lanes without signaling in order to cross from one side to another. The swerving car went over the sidewalk and killed a pedestrian. You should draw your own conclusions.

This is my pet peeve with people being so sure online about their abilities of avoiding things on the road. Yeah, maybe you could avoid it with your super human reflexes, but there physically no way you could check that side of your car, register what's there, decide whether you can move that way and then did it. The kneejerk avoidance reaction may be extremely dangerous on its own. (Also in Oz, rolling your car when…

Do people really not mentally track the vehicles around them? I remember in driver’s ed even before we were behind the wheel to have “exit strategies” for situations exactly like this. Cars don’t just appear magically next to you.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#490

Post by dotancohen »

zx8080 wrote: post #346
ehsankia wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more impressively, even in this seemingly worst case scenario where everything lined up as poorly as it could have, the car was still able to react quite aggressively and the situation ended only with minor scratches it seems? Honestly, if anything, this is probably proof that self-driving is the future, as I would bet any human would've most definitely done much worse in the same scenario.

Thare's a, probably not very obvious, situation when human could have no such accident in the same scenario. At all. Preventing an accident does not leave any trace. No one knows about the scenario if there's no accident. How many similar (and others) accidents are being prevented by human drivers daily, and no one knows about them, at all? We just don't know. That's why I take any stats of "human vs AI" driving with…

The converse argument is that human drivers hit cyclists everyday, and we never hear about them because they are not unusual.
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