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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#762Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most intersections in the Bay Area have magnetic sensors underground to detect cars and expedite a green when appropriate. Where was this mile-long stretch? 3rd street?
Yeah San Francisco has some of the best traffic lights in the Bay Area when it comes to predictive signaling and synchronization
I'm not arguing with you, but is there any documentation of SF's predictive signaling and synchronization and how it's the best?
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. The only thing that seems to get enforced around where I live is speeding, and very unevenly: one time a month or so you see them out giving tickets like gangbusters. On all other days and for all other laws, it seems like the highway is a free-for-all: Stop sign rolling, running red lights, playing with your phone while driving, weaving in…
Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time. Police offers cost a lot of money to employ, and we have a lot of publicly accessible road space. Having officers even regularly stationed at 50% of the most common routes would probably take up a lot more manpower than they have now and that means more taxes to pay for them. Creating a dedicated traffic enforcement division i…
> Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time.
Is it? Seems like heavy enforcement could pay for itself in terms of fines.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#764Earlier quoted context omitted.
This woman got dragged 20 feet by the car after the collision, and then the car rolled over her leg and left her pinned to the ground until the fire department came and removed the wheel to get her out. The cruise vehicle wasn't at fault for the initial accident, but the subsequent damage it caused was entirely the fault of the autonomous vehicle. A person would have stopped and helped the pedestrian.
People get dragged to death under cars with unaware human drivers all the time. I dont think you can definitively say a person would have stopped and helped.
A person has the potential to do more than what a Cruise vehicle actually did in the situation.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is actually an interesting question. We track how many accidents the automated cars cause, but I'm not sure how many accidents they prevent are tracked.
That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.
Well, obviously the number of autonomous vehicles involved in accidents is going to be lower, but that's because barely any of them exist compared to the vast majority of people driving their cars. If you had statistics on proportions though, that might be a different story.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
> way higher Even 10% less grievous bodily harm would be a massive improvement.
The fastest way to do that is to put size limits on personal vehicles. There has been study after study showing that the larger and heavier cars get the greater the risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...
> Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade.
Requiring cellphones to disable themselves in cars might be even more effective.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#767Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regularly see human drivers intentionally run red lights. Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.
I don't know the last time I've seen a driver do that. The closest I've seen is a school bus/van a few months back drive through a red light after the light had already been red for a number of seconds. (I already had a green for the left turn.)
I don't even drive that much, but I've seen this behavior twice in the past week and a few more times in the past few month: Driver stopped at non-sensor intersection in straight lane. Left turn arrow turns green, straight solid red stays red. Driver starts going and proceeds straight through intersection. I'm left wondering if this is part of the general breakdown of norms following Covid, or aging boomers not caring about tickets, or what. It could just have been a spurious pattern too, of course.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#768Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the bus had dynamic routing, so it could show up where I am when I’m ready, and take me where I want to go, I’d be a huge fan. I don’t mean this ironically! I think dynamically dispatched, self-driving buses and vans will eventually save public transit. They’ll enable a much higher quality of service than current bus systems. Which drive around mostly-empty stopping every few blocks so it takes forever to get anyw…
A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) is going to generally beat dispatched self driving cars in terms of convenience. 20 busses per hour is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city and doesn’t need any kind of routings because swapping lines has such a minimal wait time. However, if you’ve only experienced terrible public transit then it seems li…
> A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) ... is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city
When living in London a few years ago (clearly a major city), the wait times between buses were pretty short. They might have been about 6-10 minutes for some of the more central areas (rough guess from memory).
I'd be surprised if they were "every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) though".
Meanwhile, in Melbourne and Sydney though (substantial cities, but not London sized) the buses are more like 1/2 hour apart.
In Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia) the buses are 1 hour apart, and seem to stop about 7pm each night.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is working on a laptop not recommended in SF?
The start stop traffic gave me car sickness quickly. The 280 is a 4 lane highway that, at certain times of day, adaptive cruise control gets very little workout.
May be actually getting better over time. A lot of the screen-related car sickness goes away with the refresh rate bumped up to 120Hz. These are slowly arriving to not-completely-gaming laptops fortunately.
Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't wait till those are generally available. I'd go out more if i could have a nice night and not have to deal with coming home later. Hell i live about 1.5h from Seattle and i never go because it's just awful (to me) dealing with cars there. If i could get a cab all the way there and back? Oh man, amazing. Or even park and ride would be nice. Cities seem so much more approachable to me if i don't need to drive t…
If feel like Seattle needs an all day and weekend Sounder service, more than it needs self driving robo-taxis. 1.5 hours away you might be at the edge or beyond Sounder reach so this may not help you much unless you get a local bus to your closest station, but you can probably still just drive to your closest station and not having to have to deal with driving in the city. If the Sounder would run like the ferries do…
I am staring aghast with European eyes at a city of 4 million people where the commuter rail doesn't run outside peak hours. How do you get home if you go out for a couple of drinks with colleagues, or stay late for a call?
You shouldn't be asking for a couple of trains between 8pm and midnight. They should be every half hour, or more! Midnight until 6am on Saturday and Sunday could be every hour or two.
(I live in Copenhagen, half the population of Seattle. Commuter trains run every 20 minutes from 5-24h, every 10 6-18, all night on Friday and Saturday nights. Other trains also run, and the metro is 24/7.)