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San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

washingtonpost.com

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Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#61

Post by mlyle »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #54
mlyle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Revoke their drivers license. Impound the vehicles. > Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike. OK, well, ... surely we need to have some kind of not-exactly-equal treatment. If I commit 4 traffic offenses in a year, I'll get a suspended license. If Google commits 4 traffic offenses in a year across, say, 5,000 cars and 50,000 vehicle hours…

Why not? It's the same code across all the cars... it's as if you had a clone factory making clones of driver you.

I kind of hope you're joking, but just in case you're not I'll explain.

Because if I make a mistake every 3000 hours of driving, that's a mistake every 5-10 years. I am allowed to continue driving by the law.

If Waymo makes a mistake every 6000 hours of driving, and drives 50,000 hours per year, that's 8 per year. Said system would be twice as safe as me but would pretty much immediately get suspended if it's treated as "one driver."

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#62

Post by candiodari »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #22
mynonameaccount wrote: post #14

what if a thug stayed in the car an robbed every new rider? What if the homeless camped in the car?

Why couldn’t it drive that person to a police station for the criminal or a suitable place for the homeless person? Certainly they detect when anybody is in the car.

Whilst the city doesn't control the laws here, they control the police. So if the city intends to sabotage self driving cars? They'd lock the car down for illegal parking when arriving at the police station.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#63

Post by bigmattystyles »

I don’t know what to think about my gut reactions anymore. I guess that’s a good thing, but for instance, when bird type scooters came out and the city wanted to regulate, I thought the city council to be a bunch of luddites expecting a cut somehow. Fast forward 7 years or so and those things litter the sidewalks, people ride them very dangerously and sometimes even block handicap pathways or emergency egress. I felt the same way about them trying to clamp down on those FB/Apple/… employee buses and their use of city streets to pick up and drop off employees. I still thought that one was weird as they got more cars off the roads than anything else.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#64

Post by minwcnt5 »

There are hundreds of these driving around SF 24/7 already, and they're highly visible, so I'm not convinced they actually have issues at a higher rate than humans. Any time something unusual happens with them it's almost guaranteed to make the news. And a few times the initial knee-jerk reaction turns out to be wrong. I wonder if this whole narrative that AVs are ruining SF is going to go away after they actually get approval. I haven't heard of any protest or outrage in Phoenix, where they've had Waymo for a while now.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#66

Post by bdw5204 »

malermeister wrote: post #13
jseliger wrote: post #5

I think this is just complacency and a bias towards how things are; imagine a world in which biking is safe, pedestrians are safe, and huge amounts of the city don't have to be devoted to parking. That's what 24/7 driverless cars can enable.

In this world, we'll still have giant hunks of steel zooming around our cities, creating noise, taking up space and wasting energy to move themselves around (the payload to weight ratio of cars is abysmal). We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.

These self-driving taxis are basically just buses you can call to pick you up on demand. In areas where there's sufficient density, the most cost efficient option would probably be a self driving on demand bus. In principle, I think they can be part of the solution.

The main difficulty is making sure the self driving transit vehicles are safe enough that people feel comfortable taking them instead of individual cars. Even though you are statistically speaking less likely to get shot on Philly public transit than you are to die in a car crash on a Philly highway, many people still choose to drive because there's a shooting on transit every few months or so and other less serious disorder on a more regular basis. I assume the same is also true in other cities like San Francisco or New York.

I'm strongly in favor of walkable cities and public transit but most people are going to choose cars and suburban sprawl if it means not having to deal with rampant crime. So anybody who wants to get rid of cars and car dependent suburbs needs to be in favor of both locking up the criminals (in a manner that respects their rights to due process of course) and addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty, bad schools, drugs, etc.) so we don't end up with another generation of hardened criminals.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#67

Post by spaceman_2020 »

gWPVhyxPHqvk wrote: post #34
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest people do when the weather isn’t quite as nice? Where I live, it gets so brutally hot and humid in the summer that people literally collapse and die if they do anything much outdoors.

That sounds like a place not suitable for human life.

Well, hundreds of millions of people already live here.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#68

Post by spaceman_2020 »

fairity wrote: post #31
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you take all human driven cars off the road, you’re not going to get nearly the efficiency and safety you describe. I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber. Big Tech has way, way too much power already. Please don’t give them any more of it.

> I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber. Seems like a red herring. I think it’s safe to assume that you will be able to own your own SDC, and the faster Google gets this tech scaled, the sooner you can affordably purchase one.

Will the SDC not get any updates over the internet? What Google decides to lock me out? Or show me unskippable ads before starting the car?

I don’t think the self driving car cheerleaders have thought this out.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#69

Post by sbuttgereit »

jmclnx wrote: post #2

With these driverless cabs, will a person still be behind the wheel ? Or is no one there. If not, what happens if an accident occurs and the cab keeps on driving due to a software bug ?

Driving my kid to/from school in San Francisco, I regularly see completely empty Waymo cars driving around... pretty much every day. There's 1-3 that I see parked on a particular wide and relatively empty side street and I suspect they use that street to wait until they have a destination.

Re: San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

#70

Post by spaceman_2020 »

nfw2 wrote: post #52
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you take all human driven cars off the road, you’re not going to get nearly the efficiency and safety you describe. I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber. Big Tech has way, way too much power already. Please don’t give them any more of it.

If you rely on human-operated cars for transport, your ability to go anywhere is already controlled by large institutions. - You require a car manufacturer like Ford or Toyota to manufacture and sell you a vehicle. - You require an insurance company to cover your liability. - The government must issue you a license, which it may take away at any time for not abiding by its traffic laws.

Well, you atleast have some control over the government and can theoretically vote out any policies that would deny you the license to drive a vehicle.

Google is not beholden to any democratic process and can summarily deny my request to go somewhere.

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