[HN Gopher] Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New Yo...
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Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New York City
Author : alexrustic
Score : 218 points
Date : 2021-11-03 14:27 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.waymo.com)
| 1024core wrote:
| I wonder how well they'll do in the snow/sleet/mush conditions.
| So far they've been testing in perfect weather conditions.
| [deleted]
| endisneigh wrote:
| at what point would it be easier just to lobby to standardize
| roads and profit share with said cities to keep the "standard
| roads" in place?
| enahs-sf wrote:
| Having seen these putting around the Inner Richmond at night and
| now visiting NYC and witnessing the chaos that is driving here,
| i'm not sure they're quite ready to handle this level of a
| problem.
|
| NYC would require a true level 5 autonomous vehicle and i'm not
| sure it's even possible to drive 100% legally at all times given
| variables like construction, pedestrians going the wrong way on
| one-ways on scooters, et al.
|
| I hope they can figure it out and wish them good luck!
| convolvatron wrote:
| you know that thing where drivers see a bicyclist and just shut
| down because they are afraid they are going to dart out in
| front of them (not arguing with the instinct, bicyclists are
| pretty bad)
|
| I ride near the waymo depot on the way to work. they always
| don't know what to do about me and pretty much just stop in
| confusion until I'm well clear. forget about construction. I
| just cant imagine what they would do in an actual urban
| environment.
|
| this whole thing just feels like a deeply misplaced marketing
| excersise right now.
| LeanderK wrote:
| As I understood it they are only gathering data, it might be a PR
| stunt. I think we're still not able to handle such chaotic
| environments.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Waymo seems to do lot of these sort of publicity stunts. As far
| as I know their service and lidar mapping is very limited to
| some suburbs of Phoenix
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| They give full autonomous rides in Chandler, but are giving
| safety driver-in-the-car rides in SF and Phoenix.
|
| Doesn't seem like much of a publicity stunt
| LegitShady wrote:
| I don't think safety driver in the car rides have any
| value. They're just getting paid to add sensor data to
| their ml platform.
| horsemans wrote:
| What problem is this solving? NYC doesn't have a problem with
| people either not being able to drive or not knowing where
| they're going. We have workable (for an American definition of
| workable) mass transit and several livery services including
| taxis and Uber.
|
| We're trying to get rid of cars here. Congestion pricing, the
| widening of pedestrian and biking thoroughfares, just to name two
| initiatives. We don't need more cars, regardless whether or not
| they're being human-driven or not.
| randomopining wrote:
| NYC needs to up it's biking game. It's getting there but still
| a long ways away. Plus riding a citi bike is like a life-or-
| death experience half the time.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| I agree. Public transportation in the US is great if we use
| 1950s standards. It's falling behind because politicians don't
| have a long enough cycle to see the fruits of their labor.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Faster, cheaper, safer, more reliable transport has always been
| a strong value proposition and likely always will be.
|
| There are technical risks here, but there are not product/value
| proposition problems.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| NYC has something around 200,000 for-hire drivers among taxis,
| Ubers, etc. The need for all that human effort can be removed.
|
| Yes, eliminating cars entirely would be great, but that's an
| orthogonal problem.
| EastOfTruth wrote:
| Maybe you could eliminate most parking spaces and reduce the
| total number of cars if everyone would share a number of real-
| self-driving cars.
| mindvirus wrote:
| NYC is going to be an interesting case. As soon as pedestrians
| get comfortable that the cars won't hit them, I suspect a lot of
| jaywalking will happen - I wonder if they'll get anywhere at all.
| You sort of have to br an aggressive driver too with taxis and
| delivery trucks, so I'm really curious to see how it all works
| out.
| Animats wrote:
| _You sort of have to be an aggressive driver too with taxis and
| delivery trucks, so I 'm really curious to see how it all works
| out._
|
| There's a theory paper on this: "Go ahead, make my day: Robot
| conflict resolution by aggressive competition"[1] This is a
| known problem with mobile hospital robot carts. Many hospitals
| have robot carts moving linens and meals around a big plant. If
| they make no attempt to get others out of their way, they keep
| getting stalled by people talking in halls and crowding into
| elevators. So some degree of pushyness has to be programmed in.
|
| Cars, though. That may not work out as well. Maybe lighting and
| sound effects to encourage people to get out of the way.
|
| [1]
| http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.43.4...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Great link. Thanks.
| gen220 wrote:
| Yep, I think this is how it's going to work out, too. The
| dawdling driverless vehicles (paralyzed by opportunistic
| jaywalkers) will actually make the traffic worse.
|
| The worst possible future is if entrenched interests (waymo,
| etc) begin lobbying for more active measures of jaywalking
| enforcement (first policing, but also fences to keep those
| pesky humans on the sidewalk), as a way to get around the
| technical problem of becoming a more aggressive/communicative
| driver.
|
| The only natural conclusion of that possible future would be
| streets that are utterly hostile to humans, which would be
| throwing away one of NYC's best assets.
|
| I hope it doesn't come to fruition! And I hope driverless car
| tech can solve this problem.
|
| The idea is developed more / better articulated here:
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/12/automated-vehi...
| asdff wrote:
| I really don't know why driverless car companies aren't going
| all in on busses. You can sell your tech to bus
| manufacturers, and if you lobby for BRT you have your own
| grade separated right of way which makes a lot of these
| monumental engineering challenges with self driving cars poof
| into thin air instantly. The biggest cost for a bus for a
| transit agency is the benefits package and salary for the
| driver.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Because cars are more general purpose and thus
| significantly bigger market. Google is a $2 trillion market
| cap business. Building a $100 bill business, for example,
| isn't going to move the needle. It sounds crazy, but they
| sort of _have_ to go after things this large.
| schoolornot wrote:
| Jaywalking aside, I'm interested in seeing how these vehicles
| handle the green arrows + pedestrian GO signals that occur at
| the same time.
| itisit wrote:
| Jaywalking is already constant and ubiquitous in NYC. Most
| people simply do not observe crosswalk lights and wait to cross
| a street (not talking about avenues). And distracted
| pedestrians on their phones have brought the danger to a whole
| new level over the last decade. As you suggest, some bad actors
| will take it even further and provocatively test the safety
| response of automated cars. Pedestrian deaths are on the rise
| in NYC, and I believe beta testing self-driving cars will only
| contribute to that trend.
| amelius wrote:
| Question: will their self-driving cars be safe even if the deep-
| learning part of their code always makes the wrong prediction?
| b20000 wrote:
| so did they fix google docs?
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| Having ridden in a Waymo in Phoenix a month ago, I don't think
| they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan
| traffic. As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed
| turns several times forcing a reroute around the block because it
| couldn't change lanes because the driver in the next lane didn't
| let it in. A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to
| get ahead of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch
| over the line to force themselves in. The Waymo car just
| maintained its speed and lane position until it was too late to
| turn. I can't imagine how the car would fare in NYC with its
| famously aggressive drivers.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > I don't think they are anywhere close to being able to handle
| Manhattan traffic.
|
| That's why they are starting to map new york and record human
| driving.
|
| > Our vehicles will be manually operated by autonomous
| specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance our
| technology in support of our mission to make roads safer.
|
| They are not starting any sort of taxi service, nor are they
| letting the computer drive, according to the article.
| sschueller wrote:
| As a Massachusetts driver I think it would be great to get as
| many of these on the road because it would be free flowing
| traffic for me without having to deal with people being pissed
| off.
|
| All the things I don't do because a human is driving I could
| start doing.
|
| Drive all the way to the end of a line of cars taking an exit
| ramp and just cut it. The waymo car will always yield. Same
| goes for zipper traffic, just go for it, waymo will back off.
| Could probably also steal a parking spot from a waymo
| vehicle...
| jrockway wrote:
| > As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed turns
| several times forcing a reroute around the block because it
| couldn't change lanes because the driver in the next lane
| didn't let it in.
|
| This is basically how I navigate NYC on my bike. Sometimes I
| can easily make a left turn, and do. Sometimes I evaluate that
| that's not possible, and make three rights at the next block
| instead. It works out in the end.
| nova22033 wrote:
| _A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to get ahead
| of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch over
| the line to force themselves in_
|
| Is this exactly the kind of behavior that would make self-
| driving cars safer?
| jeffbee wrote:
| It will be safer but it will also be stopped in one place for
| a long time, possibly forever. A driver attempting to proceed
| through an intersection in Manhattan needs to present a
| credible appearance of being willing to kill someone,
| otherwise the pedestrians and other cars will just block it
| in a continuous parade, regardless of the state of the
| signals. I don't really see how you can program a car to deal
| with that.
| paxys wrote:
| Every city on earth thinks their traffic is the most chaotic.
| Having driven around Manhattan a lot, I'd say it is probably
| the easiest use case for automation. Wide streets, perfect
| grid, slow traffic, flat, standard weather conditions, no two-
| way traffic lanes to cross. In fact I fail to see how this data
| would even be valuable to Waymo compared to what they are
| already getting from Phoenix and San Francisco.
| 1986 wrote:
| > perfect grid
|
| Only above 14th Street, and even then, that ignores e.g.
| Broadway which has a bunch of really frustrating-to-drive
| intersections with a ton of pedestrian traffic
|
| > standard weather conditions
|
| A year in Manhattan has significantly more variability in
| weather conditions than a year in Phoenix or San Francisco
|
| > no two-way traffic lanes to cross
|
| There are undoubtedly significantly more one-ways in
| Manhattan than many other cities but two-way streets
| absolutely still exist, most of the wider streets in the grid
| system are two-way, so's Houston
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It isn't a perfect grid and the streets aren't all wide.
| There is no shortage of two way streets where left turns are
| impossible without skirting the law.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yes yes, never mind the pedestrians for whom crosswalks and
| walk indicators are mere suggestions, or the thousands of
| delivery guys going 30mph on e-bikes in every _possible_
| (different from legal!) direction of travel.
|
| And while there are lots of wide, slow, neatly gridded
| streets, there are tons of streets that are none of those
| things.
|
| NYC is certainly not the most chaotic, but it's a billion
| times more so than _Phoenix_.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This is just east coast cities..
|
| Something that astonished me when I moved to SF was how
| little people jaywalk here.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Correct! Functional cities have rampant jaywalking.
| pchristensen wrote:
| I think it's safe to say that Manhattan traffic is more
| complex than suburban Phoenix, without claiming Manhattan
| traffic is the most chaotic.
| pie42000 wrote:
| You are either a troll, or have never driven a car in
| Manhattan. It is without a doubt the craziest, rudest, most
| agrrssive city I have ever driven in, and is 100% the hardest
| city to automate driving in. If Waymo can succeed in NYC,
| they can succeed anywhere in the first world. India and
| Thailand are a whole different ball game, but we will see.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Yea I don't know how one can look at NYC traffic and claim
| it's anything other than a total shitshow.
| [deleted]
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I found driving in Manhattan to be fairly civilized,
| honestly. Boston, on the other hand, is by far the worst
| city I've driven in on the surface street level. Atlanta
| the worst for highway driving.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Drivers in Boston are definitely more aggressive than
| those in NYC but the built environment in NYC is 5x more
| intense / insane.
| ddp26 wrote:
| Agree, it's perplexing that Waymo thinks it makes more sense to
| start mapping out NYC rather than making the product work in
| Phoenix or SF.
|
| You could interpret this as confidence, i.e. they're so close
| to a working service in Phoenix/SF that they want to lay the
| groundwork for NYC right away.
|
| Or you could interpret is as a lack of confidence, i.e. they
| don't have much progress to report, and they're positioning
| that as "the reason we don't have a working product yet is that
| we're trying to solve the whole problem at once, and that's
| really hard."
| curiousllama wrote:
| Seems like a great reason to test, gather data, and improve in
| NYC, no?
| tonypags wrote:
| I can't wait to see one and punch the hood and yell "I'm
| walkin' here!"
| tempest_ wrote:
| I don't know about New York but I live in a major city and
| I wonder what will happen when the homeless population
| figures out they can mess with them.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| "Mess" with them? WDYM?
|
| I live in SF by the way.
| vntok wrote:
| What is this population currently doing with cars
| operated by humans and how would it be any different?
| natch wrote:
| Envisioning a "keep summer safe" approach...
| tempest_ wrote:
| It is not uncommon to see someone cut across the road and
| scream at people in cars or throw things.
|
| Depending on the driver lots of different stuff happens.
| Some will drive around them, others get out and confront
| them etc.
|
| I suspect an automated vehicle will just come to a stop
| an wait.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Worst case, add one more person armed with a crowbar and
| then we have the smash and grab thieves that seem to
| rampant in San Francisco with a very compliant automated
| driver stuck behind the accomplice just standing in front
| of the vehicle.
| dont__panic wrote:
| In my city, mostly throwing glass bottles at vehicles and
| screaming.
| ethnt wrote:
| Sounds more like a great reason to stay away from some of the
| most chaotic traffic in the US until it can be considered
| safer. There are far, far more pedestrians in NYC than in
| Phoenix, and I do not trust a Waymo car to not hit some of
| them.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| And as evidence for that, you use ... an example of Waymo
| being overly cautious?
|
| I routinely drive and walk near these vehicles, they do not
| seem in danger of hitting anyone.
| mpalmer wrote:
| There are people behind the wheel.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| In the article (only a few paragraphs btw) it specifically
| says the goal is to map and have safety operators manually
| controlling all the vehicles.
| deegles wrote:
| I trust a Waymo car way-more than Tesla's autopilot...
| wepple wrote:
| When I got my NYC drivers license, the full end to end test
| was 8 minutes (I got a printout) on empty roads.
|
| I'd take a high quality autonomous vehicle over a tired
| Uber driver any day as a pedestrian
| ridethebike wrote:
| Yeah, approximately 10 minutes for me to pass driving
| test (from second attempt). And then around a year of
| driving (effectively training myself) in city to get more
| or less comfortable with traffic.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Well I think "high quality" is doing a lot there.
| Obviously autonomous vehicles would be safer if they work
| perfectly -- the concern is that they will not.
| [deleted]
| the-pigeon wrote:
| But to what end?
|
| Gathering more data on a problem you don't know how to solve
| won't give you a solution to solving it. We don't have any
| evidence to support that current AI is capable of the
| advanced problem solving the city driving requires.
| cjrp wrote:
| Sounds like a great reason to train the model on a closed
| road with a trained (and consenting) driver playing the role
| of "lane-blocking-driver" (in that example).
| ahahahahah wrote:
| This isn't Tesla we're talking about, Waymo has a large
| testing facility where they do exactly that sort of thing.
| Here's an indepth report on it from 4 years ago https://www
| .theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...
| natch wrote:
| But that would take about a billion years, with all the
| variations and edge cases.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| It would take the same amount of time if they're on a
| closed course or in a city. The difference is you'd need
| to pay a lot more people to work on it.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Do Waymo hire people working permanently remote or is it all in-
| office?
| halotrope wrote:
| Mobileye released a demo some time ago that shows their system
| driving in NYC: https://youtu.be/50NPqEla0CQ
| ck2 wrote:
| If a self-driving car kills someone, who is put on trial for
| negligence?
| dml2135 wrote:
| The same as if a human hits someone with a car -- nobody.
| ktsayed wrote:
| Very excited to hop into one of these, hope they expand to
| Brooklyn soon.
|
| I feel like alarmbells must be going of @ Uber HQ with how fast
| Waymo is scaling
| wallaBBB wrote:
| I always got a filing Uber was not serious about it and used it
| more for evaluation pump.
|
| Tesla is the one that should be hearing alarmbells, their
| evaluation is partially coming from their promises of (real)
| FSD, that they have been overpromising and underdelivering so
| far.
| asdfsd234234444 wrote:
| They are literally the only company that has autopilot in
| production at scale.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| Waymo is doing autonomous driving though, autopilot is
| driver assist, they're not even remotely the same product.
| robert_foss wrote:
| Well.. Uber sold their self-driving division to Aurora (Sequoia
| Capital and Amazon). They've kinda committed themselves to
| being solely a gig-economy app with no plans or ambition.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| spending piles of money developing self-driving and managing
| a large fleet of automated cars is kind of antithetical to
| the way uber operates anyway
| afavour wrote:
| It was explicitly their goal back in the day. Paid drivers
| were seen as a stepping stone.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| and it didn't make sense to me then either! They'd have
| to build out massive fleets of cars and technicians... at
| the moment they're really just managing contractors and
| do simple background checks and car inspections... much
| less overhead than maintaining a fleet.
| jjulius wrote:
| Not exactly; they want the benefits that they think self-
| driving will bring, without doing the work.
|
| > Aurora is not paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was
| valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment
| last year from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank's Vision Fund.
| Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing
| $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in
| the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S.
| Securities and Exchange Commission. (As a refresher, Uber
| held an 86.2% stake (on a fully diluted basis) in Uber ATG,
| according to filings with the SEC. Uber ATG's investors held
| a combined stake of 13.8% in the company.) Shareholders in
| Uber ATG will now become minority shareholders of Aurora.
| Notably, once the deal closes, Uber together with existing
| ATG investors and the ATG employees who continue their
| employment with Aurora are expected to collectively hold
| about 40% interest in Aurora on a fully diluted basis.
|
| > Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will take a board seat in the
| newly expanded Aurora.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/07/uber-sells-self-driving-
| un...
| lhorie wrote:
| Uber is basically shifting from a heavy NIH "build, don't
| buy" culture to a less insulated culture. This is manifesting
| at all levels, from more widespread adoption of AWS/GCP
| internally to seeking partnership deals (in SDV w/ Aurora,
| but also in other areas e.g. SKTelecom, etc)
| leesec wrote:
| Is this a joke? Their scaling has been at a snails pace.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| That's how the start of an exponential growth trend works.
| babypuncher wrote:
| NYC presents a lot of driving challenges not present in Phoenix.
| This must mean they are feeling more confident about how well
| their technology handles winter driving conditions and lots of
| pedestrians.
| KerrickStaley wrote:
| The current title on HN is misleading. They are not beginning to
| test their self-driving system; rather, they are beginning to
| collect map data, which is a step that needs to be done first.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I wonder if people will just get used to the way driverless cars
| drive and make some allowances for them. Waymo at least are easy
| to spot.
|
| As a driver really your main job is to be predictable. If you're
| doing something legal or dumb or borderline. The main thing you
| need is for everyone to understand what that thing is.
|
| So as long as waymo cars are predictable we'll be able to get
| used to them.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I see a lot of comments that conclude that the only way to drive
| in NYC is to drive like a local. AVs will be an interesting
| experiment in attempting to break the paradigm. AVs have infinite
| patience. I'm sure that will drive some locals accustomed to
| aggressive driving right out of their minds. AVs will drive
| differently. That may be good thing.
| [deleted]
| staccatomeasure wrote:
| Hope they're trained to react to "I'm walkin' here!"
| nickcodes wrote:
| Self driving is an interesting paradox. Many of the problems we
| have with self-driving cars would be mitigated by having a large
| majority of self-driving cars on the road sharing data and
| coordinating with each other as a network. Need to merge left in
| 2 miles? Ask the cars in the other lane to slow or accelerate
| slightly to provide the opening. Unfortunately we can't simply
| flip a switch and enter this reality, and we're stuck trying to
| solve the much harder problem of designing self-driving cars that
| can ably share the road with other human drivers.
| mysterEFrank wrote:
| I'm surprised waymo is collecting data in manhattan where there's
| great public transit coverage. The outer boroughs would be much
| more useful.
| pricecomstock wrote:
| As someone who both bikes and drives around Brooklyn, I would bet
| this is going to be nearly a decade of testing. There are so many
| edge cases that I encounter on almost every single trip, and I
| just don't see anything but very advanced AI handling it
|
| - obvious, but large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists
|
| - 2 way roads becoming 1 lane where the directions must take
| turns due to construction, deliveries, or the Uber in front of
| you stopping in the middle of traffic for a pickup
|
| - resurfaced roads that don't have lines painted on them for
| weeks or months
|
| - congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3
| hours to pass through legally, so you have to just pull into the
| intersection trusting that traffic will clear when the next light
| turns green
|
| - pittsburgh lefts need to happen for the sake of traffic flow
| sometimes
|
| - sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation"
| to get into the lane you need.
|
| - another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next
| turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of
| situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip
| time
|
| - you can disrupt traffic flow quite badly if you e.g. don't pull
| up to the crosswalk, and out of the way of cars behind you, while
| waiting for pedestrians to cross on a turn (humans are also bad
| at this)
|
| - it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are
| double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and
| bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is
| a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing
| adwi wrote:
| > it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are
| double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and
| bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this
| is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing
|
| This is so true. Cars haphazardly double park on either side.
| Best case you're dodging and weaving, drifting through the
| painted lane suggestions. Sometimes you're just stuck and
| waiting while one of them decides to move. Always the
| bicyclists get the raw end of the deal in terms of their safety
| and priority.
|
| I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking
| from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes,
| and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on
| both sides.
|
| If you just had one functioning, unimpeded lane for car traffic
| I suspect it'd improve traffic conditions considerably, vs.
| four extremely inefficient lanes for cars (2x parking, 2x
| driving)
| mattzito wrote:
| >I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking
| from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes,
| and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on
| both sides.
|
| They do this a lot in midtown - commercial only parking
| during business hours to allow loading/unloading AND you
| don't need the cops to enforce it because the traffic
| enforcement people can just write tickets
| bobthepanda wrote:
| just fyi, the traffic enforcement people _are_ cops.
| Giuliani had them moved under NYPD because otherwise they
| kept getting assaulted.
| hiidrew wrote:
| happy to see the shout out to the pittsburgh left
| asdff wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if self driving cars just never go on
| most roads and only stay on a handful of well mapped and easy
| to interpret routes. Like how trucks follow certain routes
| through cities too.
| ogjunkyard wrote:
| I see Waymo/Cruise/Zoox autonomous vehicles multiple times a
| day in San Francisco and every one of these points are
| something that happens all the time in San Francisco.
|
| Something I didn't see mentioned about NYC was elevation
| changes and hills, which is something that San Francisco has
| all over. There are some VERY steep streets in San Francisco,
| which means that sensors are out of typically alignment in
| relationship to the road when an autonomous vehicle is at an
| intersection.
| nojs wrote:
| If anyone else was wondering:
|
| > The Pittsburgh left is a colloquial term for the driving
| practice of the first left-turning vehicle taking precedence
| over vehicles going straight through an intersection,
| associated with the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area. [1]
|
| I guess that would be a Pittsburgh right where I come from :)
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left
| ep103 wrote:
| So honest question, when I'm stuck behind one of these fucking
| things refusing to take a turn correctly, because it means
| crossing the white line, what do I do?
|
| With a human driver, I can blare the horn, or, god forbid, get
| out of the car to talk to them.
|
| But with a driverless car, what do I do? Honk at an empty
| vehicle that literally has no ears?
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| I love the idea that driverless cars might lower the amount
| of honking by reducing the number of people who can respond
| to a honk
| jrockway wrote:
| Someday I'm going to run for mayor of New York City to
| institute exactly one policy change. I'll add horn
| detectors to all traffic lights, and every time it hears a
| honk, it will make the light stay red for an additional 10
| seconds.
|
| Yes, I know that I will be brutally murdered on my second
| day in office.
| xmprt wrote:
| Do the same thing. There's still a human behind the wheels.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| You sound like a complete dick when you are behind the wheel.
| Please consider stopping driving. Your role as a driver isn't
| to correct other people's driving; it's to get you and your
| passengers somewhere safely, while keeping all other road
| users safe.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Why are you so angry?
| romwell wrote:
| Because for New Yorkers, the light in the end of the tunnel
| is... New Jersey.
| MisterTea wrote:
| If you were born in NYC like me you develop a deep seeded
| hatred for the human race.
| Kye wrote:
| This would explain all the NYT and Bloomberg articles
| trying to start fights between different demographics,
| and the weird aggrieved fixation on the closure of little
| shops in NYC only known to people on a single street in
| NYC that wouldn't warrant an international feature
| anywhere else.
| afavour wrote:
| > the weird aggrieved fixation on the closure of little
| shops in NYC
|
| Yeah... NYT has a metro section dedicated to local
| coverage. They're not international features. But since
| when has logic and reason stood in the way of a good old
| rant about the media?
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious
| conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't
| fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of
| the community."_
|
| >> _" Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."_
|
| I am, of course, talking about the occasional article
| that makes noise outside NYC. I'm nowhere near NYC. I
| have never really noticed which "section" a story in the
| NYT or Bloomberg is in when it finds its way to me. If it
| had stayed local, I obviously wouldn't have anything to
| say about it since I never would have seen it.
|
| That was not a rant, much less one about "the media."
| That was a gentle rib at New York City media's tendency
| to self-aggrandize and spill outside in a way that isn't
| self-aware. I buy all my camera and computer stuff from a
| little corner shop in NYC and wouldn't mind visiting some
| day, so this is all in good fun.
| [deleted]
| knowfilter wrote:
| Presumably because they have to drive a car in downtown
| Brooklyn occasionally
|
| _This Brooklyn Intersection Is The Worst In The State,
| Study Finds_
|
| https://patch.com/new-york/parkslope/brooklyn-
| intersection-w...
| emkoemko wrote:
| Jesus you shouldn't be driving a car if you are that angry
| romwell wrote:
| You stare angrily at the passenger until they unlock the door
| and let you drive the damn thing through the intersection :D
| dml2135 wrote:
| Great summary. This will be an interesting experiment that I
| think will ultimately fail.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| On the basis of what evidence? Seems quite pessimistic given
| that waymo has been stepping up its activity in sf
| considerably over the last year.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Just curious more than anything, has there been any
| model/ai/robot-car that has even come close to responding
| to the kinds of nuances described above? It seems like so
| far we are just celebrating that the cars that can stay in
| a lane, not hit things, which is a huge I get it, but I
| don't see how sophisticated CV heuristics could even come
| close to approximating the kinds of edge cases that exist
| here, both in the social sense of communicating with other
| drivers, and responding to things that should not be the
| case (no lines on a road, a double parked car), but in
| practice are the case everyday in cities.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yes, I routinely drive next to these driverless things
| and they are negotiating plenty of annoying & complicated
| stuff. I think I must live in a peak location because
| they are everywhere in my neighborhood in SF, which has
| lots of fast cars and pedestrians and bikers and
| skateboarders doing all sorts of crazy things.
|
| Like these actually exist, I guess people on the East
| coast don't realize it yet?
| ra7 wrote:
| There are videos of Waymo successfully negotiating a
| Costco parking lot. Here is a recent video of some
| scenarios in SF that are close to the nuances described
| above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA.
| Notice how there are activity icons indicating
| pedestrians running, truck stopped with a door open and
| so on. They can _understand_ a scene pretty well.
|
| Behavior prediction is a large research focus now
| according to Waymo, so they are thinking about complex
| situations like these. But a lot of them (like no lane
| lines, construction, 2 way roads becoming 1 way) can just
| be encoded in HD maps and distributed to the whole fleet.
| [deleted]
| rcthompson wrote:
| This partly falls under "3 hours to pass through legally", but
| I would add to this the significant number of major
| intersections where the marked lanes are completely ignored at
| all times. For example one intersection I'm familiar with has a
| single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp. However,
| probably at least 60% of cars passing through the intersection
| want to get on the highway, so in practice both of the lanes
| adjacent to the designated lane are _also_ used to access the
| on-ramp, resulting in an uncontrolled 3-way merge during a
| sharp left turn in the middle of an intersection.
|
| Edit: For anyone curious, my particular example is getting on
| 278 South coming from the southeast on Prospect Ave.
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/ySokhy6uXEPPGoG8A
| crmd wrote:
| > one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of
| 4 leading to the highway on ramp.
|
| I suspected instantly you were talking about the prospect Ave
| BQE entrance . I make that left off third ave onto Hamilton
| most mornings, and the difference between being in the first-
| or second-from-left vs third-from-left turning lane is
| probably an extra 10 minute delay for exactly the reason you
| describe. I'm no expert in self-driving cars/line following
| robots, but I suspect real-world NYC driving is
| computationally impossible at this time.
| pricecomstock wrote:
| I was curious! But not too curious, since this maybe
| describes most of the on-ramps to the BQE
| totoglazer wrote:
| Yes, this also describes, for example, the next entrance at
| Hamilton and Hicks. Although there's it's narrower so
| primarily just one extra lane.
| testfrequency wrote:
| Nothing about what you have said is unique to NYC/Brooklyn.
|
| Every major dense city that is piloting self-driving cars has
| been modeling around most of the scenarios you've described
| paganel wrote:
| Funny how congested cities resemble each other, I live in
| Bucharest (one of the most congested cities in Europe when it
| comes to road traffic) and I checked 7 out of the 9 points you
| mentioned (I'm too lazy to search for what a Pittsburgh left
| means and I ignored the waymo-specific bullet-point).
|
| I'll add the numerous cases when you have cyclists (especially
| delivery guys) and rental scooters coming your way on a one way
| street. Because of that I always, always check both ways when
| entering a one way street from a side-street because you never
| know what may be coming the wrong way "illegally", so to speak.
| jorts wrote:
| A Pittsburg left is turning left before oncoming traffic
| starts moving.
| paganel wrote:
| Yeah, saw that now. Guilty as charged, I'm not always doing
| it but there are certain intersections where you can do it
| in a relatively safe way (especially if you tilt/move as
| much as you can to the left before the green-light comes
| on).
| spamizbad wrote:
| This problem might get solved for self-driving vehicles by
| simply banishing non-autonomous vehicles (including bicycles
| and pedestrians) from the roads.
| circular_logic wrote:
| That sounds like it would further increase car dependence in
| city's, how you see city's improving in this scenario?
| spamizbad wrote:
| oh I'm absolutely not saying this is a good idea. But what
| I am saying is that it could become politically feasible if
| tons of money gets poured into self-driving vehicles and
| they slowly chip away at "open" use of public streets.
|
| Look at what the automobile industry did with "jaywalking"
| and removal of street cars.
| gehatare wrote:
| Banning all other traffic is of course a solution, but it is
| hugely unpopular for obvious reasons, so I doubt it will
| pass.
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah NYC is crazy. One thing I saw this summer is streets in
| Little Italy and Chinatown with exactly one lane, and
| restaurant boxes on BOTH sides in the parking spots.
|
| So if there was a delivery truck that parked to unload, and
| there were, literally entire blocks of traffic would have to
| wait behind it.
|
| Sometimes a parking spot would open up between the restaurant
| boxes. The truck can pull in there a tiny bit but not all the
| way.
|
| Then maybe there is room for the driver behind to pass. They
| are scraping by with literally 1 to 3 inches of room,
| negotiating the space manually.
|
| I can't even see a remote driver handling this situation!
|
| I also think this "testing" won't lead to much concrete in the
| next 5-10 years. There will be data gathering and spinning of
| wheels. After all I think by 2016 they were also "testing" in a
| bunch of places, and 5 years later it's barely deployed.
| JakeTheAndroid wrote:
| To be honest, I'd happily let my car mess up the flow of
| traffic trying to block the box. The only reason this exists is
| because everyone decides to enter the box to make the light.
|
| When working in SF without self driving I would regularly not
| let myself block the box and I'd miss multiple lights. Police
| need to actually ticket people that do this. I've seen cops
| sitting at the intersection waiting to ticket people for
| bypassing traffic by using the carpool freeway entrance while
| doing fuckall about the blocked intersection causing people to
| want to choose the HOV option.
|
| I understand that it's a part of driving that a self driving
| car would need to know how to navigate. But we really should
| just fix this problem through proper traffic enforcement
| instead of trying to make self driving cars participate in this
| completely shitty and unnecessary practice.
| pricecomstock wrote:
| I agree with you in principle about not blocking the box. But
| in practice it's not always like that. Sometimes the actual
| light timing needs to change. Sometimes the roads need to
| just be different than they are to prevent bottlenecks, which
| is a pretty expensive fix
|
| Sometimes you roll up to an intersection, and every time the
| light turns green, the direction you're trying to go already
| has all lanes filled by another approaching direction. Every
| time.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| Classic prisoners dilemma. The lanes are blocked because
| the people up ahead are thinking the same thing.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| This is - imo - the biggest issue with traffic
| everywhere. It's a game theory problem, where being
| greedy is often the best move.
| curtain wrote:
| The spring paradox is a neat example of this:
| https://youtu.be/Cg73j3QYRJc
|
| The shortest route only remains the shortest if a
| minority take it.
| klodolph wrote:
| My experience... the lanes are usually blocked because
| some other lane, coming some other direction, has much
| better access to those lanes because of how the signal
| timing works at the intersection.
|
| A common scenario is: you're heading east, want to head
| north. When space opens up heading north, northbound
| traffic has a green light and fills it up. When you have
| a green light, there is no space.
| polynox wrote:
| I could imagine that left turns like you mentioned would
| be systematically disadvantaged, but doesn't that just
| mean you should circle around so that you are going
| north? If instead you were going west and competing
| against northbound traffic I find it hard to believe you
| would be systematically disadvantaged; a space is equally
| likely a priori to clear out when you have a green as
| when they have a green, no?
| asdff wrote:
| >Sometimes you roll up to an intersection, and every time
| the light turns green, the direction you're trying to go
| already has all lanes filled by another approaching
| direction. Every time.
|
| The only time I can imagine this happening is when trying
| to turn left, at which point the solution is to go past the
| turn, double back, and approach the intersection so you can
| make the turn from the right.
| jefftk wrote:
| Imagine you want to go straight, but there is an
| overwhelming quantity of traffic that is turning right.
| And the lights are badly timed, so the traffic on the
| other side of the intersection does not make any progress
| during your green light.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Really, Manhattan is just a terrible place to drive. A
| horribly congested island with limited ways in and out,
| that is also sometimes the lowest-cost way to get between
| the mainland and geographic Long Island. The same goes for
| the rest of NYC to a lesser extent; shoutouts to Elmhurst
| and Flushing for being particularly terrible places to
| drive.
|
| Not a morning goes by without a report of "45 minutes/1
| hour to the Holland Tunnel." There isn't really a scalable
| fix for the solution that involves road capacity.
| whoisstan wrote:
| I live in brooklyn too and cars are an incredible pain, they
| take away space, stink, honk and are stuck in traffic on the
| BQE all the time. Replacing cars with a commuter network of
| self driving cars would be a great upgrade IMO.
| jnsie wrote:
| > congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3
| hours to pass through legally
|
| I cannot imagine how self driving cars will (in the future...)
| deal with entering the Lincoln/Holland/etc. tunnel. I genuinely
| don't think you can enter these tunnels even during moderate
| traffic without breaking at least a few laws.
| apeace wrote:
| - delivery drivers on electric bikes or mopeds zipping the
| wrong way down the road at 30mph, feeling like they are inches
| away from colliding with you
|
| - roads completely blocked because of the aforementioned
| double-parking. If someone is double-parked in a way that
| prevents a delivery truck from getting through, the entire
| block gets filled with cars that can't move. Then everyone has
| to back out, one-by-one.
|
| - situations where a police car or ambulance has their lights
| on behind you and there is literally nowhere to go to get out
| of their way other than straight through a red light.
|
| To add to something you said:
|
| > sometimes you need to do very human and assertive
| "negotiation" to get into the lane you need
|
| I'm generally a pretty slow and careful driver in other places,
| but having driven around NYC for many years now, I can say that
| it's basically necessary to be an extremely aggressive driver
| here. If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off.
| It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost
| as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and
| you get nowhere. Anyone who's taken an Uber, Lyft, or taxi in
| NYC knows the way you need to drive to get anywhere in a
| reasonable amount of time.
|
| I'd honestly be excited if they pulled it off. A robot driving
| like a real New Yorker, but presumably a lot safer? How cool
| would that be!
| toast0 wrote:
| > If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off.
| It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost
| as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and
| you get nowhere.
|
| This is going to be a major challenge or at least a major
| change for Waymo. It's been a while since I've driven near
| one, but they were very timid with lane changes. Also, there
| was that published incident when the Waymo car tried to
| change lanes into a bus.
|
| There's unwritten rules about who you can cut off. My
| experience is from LA freeways, the rules may be different in
| NYC, but the concept is the same. Buses and other vehicles,
| usually no, but sometimes. Marked taxis, no. Older vehicle
| with lots of scrapes, probably no. Also, the proper time to
| signal your lane change is often after your car is already in
| the lane enough that you can't be displaced.
| devit wrote:
| Why would you not cut off buses and taxis?
|
| They are professional drivers, so you can rely on them
| being better than the average drivers in difficult
| situations like having to brake suddenly, so I think you
| should cut them off preferentially.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| > another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the
| next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent
| number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of
| extra trip time
|
| I took a wrong turn in heavy NYC traffic once (trying to get to
| the Lincoln Tunnel on a Friday) and it cost me over 2 hours.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I mean the way to solve this is to prioritize waiting for a
| turn over the penalty to missing it.
|
| You would have the same issue if you missed the last exit in
| San Francisco and got stuck going all the way across the Bay
| Bridge (can easily hit 2 hours trying to go over and back in
| traffic both ways)
| pricecomstock wrote:
| Sort of. The issue is that it's not just "waiting for a
| turn", it's often "start changing lanes into a small gap
| because you know the human drivers will make space and let
| you in". In which case, what you're saying is "drive more
| aggressively if there's a large time penalty for not doing
| so", which is at least a mildly uncomfortable criteria to
| put into a computer algorithm
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I think it is the same criteria you apply as a human. If
| you need to get into a lane and make a turn, you will
| slow down, block your lane and inch in till someone lets
| you in.
|
| I do think there has to be an aggressiveness level in
| making maneuvers for an autonomous car. It doesn't mean
| its unsafe, it just means it could be MORE safe if the
| time penalty isn't big (a decision that regular drivers
| have a hard time evaluating since we don't measure our
| own maneuvers' safety accurately)
| dTal wrote:
| >a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer
| algorithm
|
| I suspect this is going to be a fundamental issue with
| AI. Far from some idealized 3 laws of robotics, AIs will
| need to behave like humans to fit in our society. And
| _that_ will force us to confront the ways in which we don
| 't follow our own rules - indeed _can 't_ follow our own
| rules, the rules being impractical but a convenient
| fiction to allow us feel better about ourselves.
| jefftk wrote:
| This is already happening, with driverless cars getting
| rear ended because they come to a complete stop at stop
| signs.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Actually it was a wrong turn in an unclearly-marked
| construction zone. I was using Google Maps at the time, but
| the road change was recent enough (perhaps that same
| morning) that the big G was wrong.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Then you'll just have a car stopped in a lane until someone
| takes pity on it. That isn't an acceptable solution either.
|
| The solution is to figure out what the traffic rule is
| based on what the other traffic is doing. But that
| introduces other pitfalls if you don't do it right.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I mean this is what happens to folks as they try to get
| into a one-lane exit, someone has to let you in.
|
| I guess one benefit of more autonomous vehicles might be
| cooperation between vehicles to greatly reduce traffic
| and congestion in these sorts of situations
| asdff wrote:
| The big isssue with lane merging is that you have to be
| assertive and risky in cities or you are just going to be
| trapped and no one will let you in. You have to almost
| dare cars to hit you in order to force yourself to have
| space. I can't imagine a self driving car ever doing that
| well. It's an entire dance.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Why not? They are insured and need to function. A random
| selection of assertiveness can keep the humans from
| challenging the cars too much.
| moyix wrote:
| I once tried to pass through NYC on the way from Boston to DC
| and somehow managed to get turned a full 180o around and end
| up headed back north. On the bright side, superhuman
| performance might not be a very high bar to clear here.
| andrewla wrote:
| In Philadelphia driving this is called the "New Jersey"
| problem -- you miss your turn or your exit and all of a
| sudden you're on a bridge heading to New Jersey with no real
| idea of how you got there.
| crmd wrote:
| My friends call it getting "Newarked". If we visit NJ for
| any reason and miss _any_ turn in Bergen, Hudson, Essex, or
| Union county, and try to use road signs to get back on
| track, we end up at Newark Airport Terminal C. It's like
| the entire NJ roadway system is a feed network for United
| Departures.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I've never driven in NYC, but I have biked and walked it. NYC
| may have more frequent edge cases than SF, but in terms of
| being able to handle urban edge cases I think SF is roughly
| comparable to NYC. In some regards traffic in NYC seems even
| more predictable. Like there's been times I thought a motorist
| would gun it through a red light in NYC as would happen in SF,
| only to see the driver stop and then feel embarrassed for being
| overly cautious.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yeah, Bay drivers are actually way more nuts than on most of
| the East coast.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Question for SF folks: I see self driving cars all the time in
| the inner Richmond. This is happy-path driving, all 4-way stops,
| not much traffic, not many pedestrians. Easy driving. Are the
| firms doing as much mileage in rush hour in tougher driving
| spots, e.g from Bush to 2nd to the Bay Bridge at 5pm?
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| I hate the self driving car approach. They are fitting cars into
| crappy legacy roads. They could change the infrastructure, roads
| and transportation so we won't have to avoid problems and
| eliminate the situations from occurring but we'd rather fit
| crappy models in crappy old infrastructure instead of making
| roads that are more conducive to technology. It's like making an
| android for handling a horse carriage.
| 05 wrote:
| Yeah, nope. 'smart' roads mean wasting billions on sensors that
| would become outdated soon after being installed and banning
| non-'smart' users is political suicide impossible even in
| China. Also, do animals, pedestrians and cyclists need to wear
| a transponder to avoid getting squashed like a bug?
|
| https://ideas.4brad.com/forget-smart-cities-you-need-make-yo...
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| I live in a city that uses pressure sensors to detect if a
| car passed red lights. It's still not outdated over 10 years
| later. You don't need smart roads you just need to make roads
| visible for self driving cars. They shouldn't need to be fit
| into acting like humans. Your dystopian vision is a very
| narrow and biased assumption, it doesn't need electronics,
| it's simple as using covered bridges, machine readable signs
| and powered rails like streetcars. China did exactly what I
| mentioned by using high speed rails rather than focusing on
| fitting self driving cars and bypasses the pedestrian and
| transponders you focused on avoiding.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| The posts says, " Our vehicles will be manually operated by
| autonomous specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance
| our technology in support of our mission to make roads safer."
|
| So this really is just mapping/training, not testing?
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Correct, I think the title submitted is just misleading
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe hybrid depending on conditions, driver control only
| required in case of risky situations
| shock-value wrote:
| No. According to the press release the vehicles in NYC will
| all be manually controlled at all times.
| jfk13 wrote:
| It's nice to know that the specialists who'll be operating
| these vehicles are autonomous.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Wouldn't want any Borg driving those things around.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| About that... https://research.google/pubs/pub43438/
| toast0 wrote:
| If they weren't autonomous, they'd be employees.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Really awesome stuff to see them start mapping NYC more heavily.
|
| Doesn't look like most people even bothered reading the article.
| They admit it has very little to do with trying to actually give
| rides or autonomously drive in the NYC area, but rather to map
| and get data on how the cars perform in different weather
| conditions.
|
| Hopefully this announcement also means they are finding the
| testing in SF very useful and are accelerating their expansion
| what_ever wrote:
| These days, it looks like everyone on HN comes with a
| preconceived notion about the company, topic, product,
| technology a given submission is and write their views as if
| they are expert on everything before reading the post and
| giving it a thought. e.g. in this post, Waymo, a company who
| has spent billions of dollars and years of work and research
| and being where they are right now, is posting about their
| plans. It's obvious they must have thought about the traffic,
| the jaywalkers, the complex intersections, the weather before
| making this decision. But let's ignore that and post how this
| is a bad idea. Being a skeptic is fine. It just feels like the
| skepticism is dialed to 11 here.
|
| There is nothing technical about the replies, nothing hacker
| about them. Just, "I am very smart" comments.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| I have observed the same and I'm making a more conscious
| effort to help downvote comments that aren't really adding
| anything to the conversation or are just purely snark (e.g.
| "it's almost as if...").
| natch wrote:
| Your comment unfortunately captures possibly the best summary
| of the current dominant HN culture I have seen.
|
| And yet, I get the feeling just by being straight about it,
| you also come close to breaking some HN guidelines about not
| insinuating bad intentions, etc... I do think you have done
| it in a way that is pretty reasonable though, so hopefully
| it's not a problem.
|
| Sure wish it was not this way. One, I wish it wasn't all
| about "I am very smart" and two, I also wish we could talk
| about this stuff without risking being reprimanded.
| what_ever wrote:
| > you also come close to breaking some HN guidelines about
| not insinuating bad intentions
|
| To be clear, I don't think the posters have bad intentions
| or in other words making such comments intentionally. It's
| just how any community evolves over the time if conscious
| efforts to curtail discussions heading in such directions
| are not made.
| ra7 wrote:
| > There is nothing technical about the replies, nothing
| hacker about them.
|
| Exactly. The top comment in this thread is just listing some
| complex scenarios they've encountered and then assuming Waymo
| haven't thought about it. In reality, there is already
| evidence of Waymo navigating complex situations and plenty of
| published research in those areas.
| pricecomstock wrote:
| Hey I made that comment! I assume Waymo has thought about
| it. I assume lots of people at Waymo have spent plenty of
| time in NYC. I also don't say that this was impossible or I
| think it will fail.
|
| What I do believe is that there are tons of edge cases, and
| diminishing returns with trying to solve for all of them.
| And, I would guess that it will take quite a while (the
| decade I mentioned) before self driving technology is
| capable of making >95% of trips autonomously without extra
| issues that most human drivers would handle.
|
| Additionally, I think there are moral and comfort issues
| with AI that need to be addressed. This is speculation, but
| Waymo likely aims for the appearance of safety and tunes
| things to be overly cautious. That is at odds with some of
| the dynamics of driving in NYC, where you need to be
| assertive and maybe even risky, and I'm curious to see how
| that will play out.
|
| I can see how it sounds like I'm just shitting on this
| tech. My intention was more to describe that self-driving
| in NYC is maybe even a harder problem than it sounds, and
| possibly an overreaction to the hype about this technology.
| I think about it pretty often when I'm driving or biking
| and encounter situations that seem very difficult for a
| computer to navigate.
| ra7 wrote:
| You make good points. I don't disagree that there are
| tons of edge cases and it could take a while. I mostly
| disagreed with the examples of edge cases that you think
| makes it hard. Quite a few of them can be solved with an
| up-to-date HD map (missing lane marking, construction
| zones, 1-way streets) and there is evidence of Waymo
| handling pedestrians and other complex scenarios well.
|
| NYC is definitely a harder problem. But Waymo's progress
| so far has been impressive and they have really solid
| technology from what I have followed all these years, so
| I'm pretty confident they can reasonably crack NYC. Your
| comment just sounded a bit too pessimistic for me is all
| :)
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Quite a few of them can be solved with an up-to-date HD
| map (missing lane marking, construction zones, 1-way
| streets)
|
| How do you keep these maps up to date in NYC when lane
| markings, construction zones, traffic flow, construction
| and a variety of other things are constantly changing on
| a daily basis? How do you deal with the ubiquitous
| "traffic cops" who stand in the center of many
| intersections and arbitrarily wave traffic in different
| directions?
| ra7 wrote:
| Waymo claims their cars can detect environment changes
| and share it with the rest of the fleet in real time,
| with most of the map update process automated. They've
| written a blog post on this topic:
| https://blog.waymo.com/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-
| map...
|
| As for traffic cops, here's a video of Waymo obeying hand
| signals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OopTOjnD3qY. No
| reason this couldn't be replicated in NYC as well with
| some improvements.
| leesec wrote:
| Very cool, maybe in 10 more years they'll expand to Chicago too.
| slg wrote:
| Wait, are they actually test driving self-driving cars like the
| HN title says? The article seems to indicate they are manually
| driving the cars to get the mapping.
|
| Either way, it will be super interesting to see how self-driving
| cars fare in Manhattan. I would expect that there would need to
| be tweaks to the aggressiveness of the AI to drive there compared
| to somewhere like Phoenix.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| It would not be interesting. There should not be cars in
| Manhattan whether they have 0, 1, or more drivers.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm as pro-transit as anyone but I don't foresee a future
| where we have _no_ cars in Manhattan any time soon. Taxis do
| serve a purpose even with the best subway system in the
| world, like when you need to go somewhere with more items
| than you can carry (as a parent of two young children this
| happens to me a lot more than it did in my twenties!)
|
| A Manhattan without _private_ cars would still be a huge leap
| forward and feels more achievable (though neither feel
| achievable any time soon in absolute terms)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Taxis do serve a purpose even with the best subway system
| in the world
|
| And from what I have read, while Manhattan is the best
| Subway system in the United States, it is far from being
| the best in the world (see for example, Tokyo).
| afavour wrote:
| Oh, definitely. It's woefully underinvested and hasn't
| seen large scale expansion in decades despite population
| growth. Not to mention the number of accessible stations
| is abysmal.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| a ton of money is "invested" in the subway but none of it
| seems to be spent on the trains and tunnels...
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| I'm all in favor of making our cities more pedestrian- and
| transit-centered, but isn't this a little of an
| unproductively absolutist stance? Is there much of a
| difference between a shareable self-driving car and a tram?
| josh-stylo wrote:
| I've heard this before but I'm not sure how it'd work. Would
| it just be trucks doing deliveries? Wouldn't they still need
| parking and roads? What's gained by banning the cars if you
| can't reclaim the roads?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| If they can make self-driving cars practical, it seems likely
| the technology would be transferable to buses.
|
| And that could reduce costs of and/or increase access to
| public transit. (Which could be done once the technology is
| proven, regardless of whether Waymo is interested in
| participating.)
|
| So even to someone who wants to purge Manhattan of cars, it
| still seems like it would be interesting.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| _> Wait, are they actually test driving self-driving cars like
| the HN title says? The article seems to indicate they are
| manually driving the cars to get the mapping._
|
| My read is that they're doing both, but the latter will be
| starting immediately while the former is implied to come after
| they've amassed a certain amount of both mapping and training
| data.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Key sentence:
|
| > We'll be manually driving with five hybrid Chrysler Pacificas
| on the street during daylight.
|
| So no self driving for now, not even supervised.
| lbsnake7 wrote:
| There is a future that exists where cars aren't allowed in major
| cities. Something similar to Amsterdam where people and bikes
| have right of way, and cars are the least preferred mode of
| travel. Obviously there are situations where you need motorized
| transport (emergencies, moving day, people with disabilities,
| businesses etc) but these can be serviced by autonomous vehicles
| run by the city. All vehicle infrastructure (roadways, parking)
| would be cut dramatically. Autonomous busses that pick up and
| drop you off exactly where you need would be the preferred mode
| of transport but you could even have personalized autonomous cars
| that people can rent for more privacy. But these would be slow
| moving vehicles swerving in and out of people and bike traffic,
| all connected to a central hub.
|
| Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will
| bike or walk and the demand for these vehicles would greatly
| strain the system. Not sure how you would account for it.
| brabel wrote:
| > Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one
| will bike or walk
|
| The Scandinavian big cities beg to differ.
| [deleted]
| hi5eyes wrote:
| Toronto solved this for the core with an underground mall
| scoopdewoop wrote:
| If only New York had a series of underground tubes connecting
| different parts of the cities. We could put trains in those
| tubes!
| Johnie wrote:
| Are you referring to the steam pipes?
|
| What is this? An underground metro for ANTS!?! It needs to be
| at least twice as large!!
| misiti3780 wrote:
| You can blame Robert Moses for that. Everyone that lives in
| NYC or NJ (or LI) should "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro
| and you will be blown away.
|
| He despised public transportation (because he never learned
| to drive, he always had a driver) .He actively designed
| bridges (over highways) to be purposely low so that the
| highways could not have bus lanes. When he was building the
| highways and bridges, he knew that the solution was to
| combine them with subway lines to reduce traffic congestion
| but refused to because he was so arrogant and power hungry.
| His solution was always to widen existing highways or build
| more highways, and public transportation ridership went from
| very high in the 1920s to very low in the 1950s/60s.
|
| He did build a lot of stuff, but you could argue that NYC in
| 2021 is a worse place because of it -- and you really could
| argue that if you had grandparents (or great-grandparents)
| that were evicted by his housing policies or construction
| projects.
| deegles wrote:
| If we're unlucky we'll get the worst of both worlds and
| they'll build tons of tunnels for cars only.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| If that insanely stupid shit catches on, it will be the
| moment I decide to buy a missile silo or a lighthouse and
| become a full blown hermit.
| azth wrote:
| Can I find one on Zillow? :P
| jrockway wrote:
| I could live with this. Imagine that every street had a car
| tunnel under it; it means the space that's taken up by
| streets today could just be a pleasant park. There would be
| benches. Kids would be playing catch in them. Instead of
| loud honking because traffic moving slowly, there would be
| sunflowers and tall grass everywhere. I'll take it!
|
| It would basically remove cars from cities, without
| actually removing cars from cities. Seems like a reasonable
| compromise to me.
| andylynch wrote:
| They started building this kind of thing around London
| Walk after the war - rather than more tunnels the cars
| are at ground level and the walkways above. Best seen at
| the Barbican and in a newer flavour around JP Morgan's
| new office nearby.
| xmprt wrote:
| And how would people get in and out of the tunnels?
| jrockway wrote:
| I think we just repurpose storm drains for that. Always
| bring a ladder with you in the trunk of the car!
|
| (I'm kidding. Chicago has a mildly extensive two level
| street system, and there are just doors in the
| "basements" of buildings that open up to the subterranean
| streets. I always thought it was neat, but was also
| afraid to walk around on the lower level. Also, the top
| level wasn't parks, it was just more car lanes.)
| curiousllama wrote:
| It does sound kinda wild when you put it that way. Propose
| that today and I'd be like "what the HN delusions is this?"
| sidpatil wrote:
| Not necessarily. E.g. Hyperloop.
| gambiting wrote:
| What do you mean not necessarily. Hyperloop sounds like a
| complete and utter fantasy. Closely followed by tunnels
| in LA where cars drive themselves actually.
| Retric wrote:
| Yes, who would get into a vehicle when the outside air
| pressure is below 5 PSI. I mean if the seals broke you
| could die, and for what to save on fuel costs. What's
| next flying through the air in a flying brick instead of
| the naturally buoyant dirigible, just imagine what
| happens if the engine cuts out... It's madness, madness I
| say!
| emkoemko wrote:
| to save on fuel cost but spend a lot of money running
| pumps to keep a tube near vacuum ? these people are
| insane... just like building a tunnel to drive a car back
| and forth and pretend like its some new innovation, if
| only they knew of trains and trains that move underground
| in tunnels.
| Retric wrote:
| Commercial jet aircraft fly at 30,000 feet ~4psi to save
| on fuel which also translates to higher speeds, which was
| the joke. Hyperloop was supposed to be lower at ~0.1 psi
| mostly to allow for higher speeds.
|
| As to the effort to maintain a low vacuum, that has
| relatively minimal associated energy costs assuming the
| track is reasonably air tight.
| [deleted]
| croddin wrote:
| Yeah stop with this Boring Company crazy talk! /s
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Do you have any idea how much that would cost?!
| raldi wrote:
| Let's string wires on poles down every street in the nation
| and use them to put a device in every home that allows
| anyone in the world to ring a loud bell at any hour, day or
| night.
| ruined wrote:
| pathetic. the real money is if we blanket the planet in
| radio from high towers and poles, create thousands of
| types of mostly-incompatible portable wallet-sized
| devices that provide this ring-a-loud-bell functionality,
| make them requisite for daily life so everyone must
| purchase one to the tune of hundreds of dollars per year
| and keep it on their person, and then create an automated
| system that randomly rings every device multiple times
| per day trying to steal money. oh also they spy on
| everyone constantly and deliver incredibly volatile
| cognitohazards if you so much as look at them.
|
| and we'll move on from this when we develop cheap brain
| implants that are even worse
| dannyw wrote:
| I was thinking about how crazy this is before realising
| it's true.
| danielbln wrote:
| Still sounds partly crazy to me (German). All those lines
| on poles in the US, I think the only lines here that are
| above ground are these super high voltage long distance
| power lines, anything else is underground (and safe from
| weather etc.)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Geology is one reason. Many major urban areas in the
| western US have a layer of caliche under the surface.
| Digging through 1m+ of natural concrete makes underground
| lines even more hideously expensive than they would
| otherwise be.
| miketery wrote:
| Cars can't drive in 2 feet of snow either. And if you say what
| about plows? Plows apply to bike lanes and roads - which
| ideally would be bike / bus / vans only.
| addicted wrote:
| An alternative to not allowing cars at all is simply
| eliminating on street parking.
|
| At least in NYC.
|
| Get rid of on street parking and traffic will plummet. More
| importantly, a LOT of space will open up.
|
| This is probably true of most American downtowns.
| addicted wrote:
| In better managed cities, keeping sidewalks and bike lanes free
| of snow to the point it doesn't bother anyone is not difficult.
| It doesn't work in NYC, for example, because of, you guessed
| it, cars...specifically parked cars.
| kristo wrote:
| I don't really see how making the vehicles autonomous helps? We
| could have that future now with normal vehicles if we just
| disallow them. We don't need the technocracy to do it.
| rexreed wrote:
| The future you cite is also our past. In the 1930s most large
| urban cities had plenty of non-car transportation options,
| including electric-powered or cable-pulled streetcars,
| overhead-powered electric as well as gas-powered buses, trams,
| light rail, underground subways (since early 1900s in NYC), and
| hackneys of all sorts in the US and Europe and many other
| places around the world. In fact, it was the spread of gas-
| powered buses that killed much of the electric-powered
| streetcars in large cities in the US in the 1950s. With the
| growth of suburbs and loss of streetcars, the growth of cars in
| city centers grew unchecked as did air pollution and smog.
| xattt wrote:
| My mind goes to the healthcare staff who still have to report
| to their facility for 7:30 in the morning no matter the
| weather.
|
| There has been a lot of social change since the 1930s. Back
| then, nurses were seen as subservient and likely lived in
| residence attached to a hospital. Reporting for duty was not
| an issue on bad weather days.
|
| No one will live apart from their family in this day and age
| without appropriate compensation, like the way nurses do
| working for FHNIB nursing stations up north.
| dantheman wrote:
| I know you like the film roger rabbit, but that's not why
| trams died.
| rexreed wrote:
| It's not the entire reason but it's actually a key part of
| it [0]. Hey Roger Rabbit isn't _entirely_ fiction but all
| the good parts are :)
|
| [0] https://www.planetizen.com/node/76622
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > It's not the entire reason but it's actually a key part
| of it [0].
|
| I don't see that in your reference. It's a full-on
| debunking of the claim that it was a conspiracy.
| rexreed wrote:
| From the above referenced article:
|
| "For the record, there was a conspiracy according to the
| 1949 U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in UNITED STATES v.
| NATIONAL CITY LINES, Inc., et al. "
|
| and more to the point it actually says it up top in the
| title part of the article: "Yes, there was a conspiracy
| led by General Motors to replace streetcars with their
| buses in the 1930s."
|
| I know it was somewhat mingled with the other points in
| the article, but it was confirmed in a Supreme Court
| ruling that there was indeed a conspiracy by the National
| City Lines and others to buy up streetcar lines and close
| down operations. What the article says is that despite
| the conspiracy, the industry was already in decline, with
| the streetcar companies acquired because many were in
| bankruptcy. And as such, the decline can't be solely and
| specifically blamed on the conspiracy, which is a matter
| of trial case law at this point. What the conspiracy did
| was simply accelerate a process that might have been
| inevitable. This is why I'm saying (and Roger Rabbit)
| that it played a part, even if not the central part.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > "For the record, there was a conspiracy according to
| the 1949 U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in UNITED STATES v.
| NATIONAL CITY LINES, Inc., et al. "
|
| That conspiracy was a conspiracy to monopolize bus
| operations, not a conspiracy to replace streetcars with
| buses. The streetcars themselves were replaced largely
| because the streetcar companies had _already_ failed and
| were bankrupt, and the lower maintenance costs of buses
| vis-a-vis streetcars made them a better route to
| maintaining public transit.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I see, so there was a conspiracy, but it didn't matter.
| rexreed wrote:
| This is a fantastic little video on this topic if you're
| interested in digging further:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnFVBfhpprU. And a bit
| more from 60 minutes that makes a stronger point about
| the conspiracy and who was _really_ motivated to make
| freeways and highways a reality:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WORIrHpC8M
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Oh, I love that channel but hadn't seen that video.
| Thanks!
| spicyramen wrote:
| This may be unrealistic in our life time. I have 2 kids, 1
| toddler and 1 newborn, i can't imagine biking, using public
| transportation or anything similar when going to doctor,
| grocery shopping, etc.
| react_burger38 wrote:
| I feel you. Father of 3 here. My two year old always just
| _runs_ as far as fast as he can pretty much whenever he gets
| a chance. Won 't stay in the stroller either. Putting him in
| a carseat is much easier. Just went on a flight the other day
| with the kids and chasing him around the airport wasn't easy,
| although in the end it was somewhat manageable.
|
| Car travel with kids is _way_ easier compared to other
| methods.
|
| We took the kids to Paris a while back and carting the
| stroller up and down the stairs to the metro was a huge pain.
| jefftk wrote:
| It's definitely possible; if you talk to parents who live in
| cities they'll generally be happy to describe how they do it.
|
| (Raised two kids from 0 to 5y and 7y without a car. Started
| splitting a car about 6 months ago when we had a third child.
| Lots of walking, double decker stroller, bus, subway, and
| bike trailer.)
| shashank wrote:
| Many things are possible, but I might not like doing them.
| It's totally fine for someone to not want cars and not use
| them. But it's too far to say nobody should be using them,
| no matter what. Not implying you said that (I know you just
| commented on the "unrealistic" part), but just referring to
| the general theme here.
|
| I personally love driving. Since I was a kid, I always
| wanted to drive cars and even now, I enjoy the feeling of
| driving a car. One can argue about whether it's the best
| mode of transport, etc. but for me (and many like me), it's
| a pleasure of life.
|
| Let's try to stop people from carrying assault weapons
| before we move to cars?
| golemiprague wrote:
| It is not a matter of liking, in major congested cities
| in Europe or Asia it is impossible to use a car, where
| are you going to park? The whole city is organised
| differently. Having experience living in both type of
| cities I can understand why in a suburban US city you
| will get so attached to your car, it is basically
| connected to your freedom to get to places because there
| is no other way. But when I am in a more congested city
| with a good public transportation and bike culture, the
| car just becomes a burden.
| dropofwill wrote:
| Cars directly kill 3x the amount of people by firearm
| homicide (in the US), along with an alarming increase in
| pedestrian deaths. Not saying we should ban cars
| everywhere or anything like that, but the status quo is
| not good enough.
| saltminer wrote:
| That's because so much of the US is built around suburban
| sprawl and is incredibly hostile to anyone not in a car.
|
| I'd recommend the youtube channel "Not Just Bikes", a guy who
| moved from Canada to the Netherlands. It's perfectly normal
| over there to do everything you said is unrealistic.
|
| Imagine not having to chaperone your kids around until
| they're old enough to drive. In much of the US, this is
| unthinkable, and it takes a large mental toll on parents, but
| in the Netherlands, it's not uncommon for elementary
| schoolers to bike to and from school, friends houses, even
| riding public transit on their own.
|
| In much of the US, your kids can be taken by social services
| for this, even if it was perfectly safe for them to do so.
| And even if it's legal to let your kids be fairly
| independent, it doesn't matter when you have to fight to get
| them back (very much "you can beat the rap but you can't beat
| the ride").
|
| It's depressing just how far we've fallen under the guise of
| "protect the children".
| duderific wrote:
| > it's not uncommon for elementary schoolers to bike to and
| from school, friends houses, even riding public transit on
| their own.
|
| I did all of these things when I was in elementary school
| in the late 70's, and biking without a helmet no less.
| Hours and hours with no adult supervision, biking all over
| town.
|
| I even went to an theme park with my sister, without
| parents when we were 9 and 11 - took multiple buses to get
| there about an hour from my house. We got lost on the way
| home and didn't know which bus to get on. Somebody helped
| us and we were fine.
|
| Can you imagine the outrage nowadays if such a thing took
| place.
| [deleted]
| danny_codes wrote:
| This NotJustBikes video covers this subject nicely.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
|
| Watching his channel has reinforced the dramatically negative
| impact American transportation policy has had on urban life.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one
| will bike or walk
|
| In the absence of systems for snow removal, most people
| wouldn't be driving in 2 feet of snow either (yes, some do it,
| but some people drive in all sorts of reckless circumstances).
|
| The cities in the intersection of "viable to thrive without a
| car" and "get a lot of snow" mostly do a good job of dealing
| with the latter to preserve the former. They usually clear snow
| quickly on the thoroughfares, sidewalks and bike lanes and have
| other solutions (tunnels, non-road transit, etc) for managing
| the more difficult journeys.
| asdff wrote:
| I'd say from knowing people who live in boston and chicago
| the answer is actually mostly not. Especially in boston
| snowstorms are typically catastrophic and shut down life
| until they are cleared out which might be quite a long time.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Strong disagree - Boston & Cambridge are exceptionally
| effective at returning life to normal within hours on a
| snowy day.
|
| Many sidewalks are quickly scooped up by paid workers too.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I suspect this is a reflection of availability bias; the
| only snowstorms you hear about from the people you know in
| Boston are the ones that are catastrophic and shut down
| life (which do happen occasionally, but the same could be
| said of hurricanes in Florida).
| jefftk wrote:
| I live in Boston, and would not describe snowstorms as
| catastrophes that you just wait out. The plows are out
| right away, and only every few years is there a blizzard
| bad enough that they'll require people to stay home.
| mprovost wrote:
| I wonder how much this is going to change now that so
| many people have figured out that they can work from home
| at least part of the time. First it starts with
| snowstorms, then maybe we'll see less traffic on rainy
| days...
| mumblemumble wrote:
| 2 feet of snow on the ground is rare, and I honestly believe
| that people's worries about walking and biking in the snow are
| more reflective of a lack of familiarity than any genuine
| unpleasantness.
|
| Nordic countries manage strong bike cultures, too, and don't
| let winter get in the way of that. I have family in a mountain
| town in Colorado, and there, the only people using cars to get
| around town are the tourists, even in winter. This is also how
| all of America was, not too long ago. My great-grandmother did
| own a car, but opted instead to ride and walk, year-round,
| basically until the day she had to move into an old folks'
| home. Her family's first car was a Model T, and she just never
| did get in the habit of avoiding the outdoors.
|
| Long story short, it's amazing what human bodies can be
| comfortable with, if only you give them the chance.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I cycle around London no matter the weather. During the
| "beast from the East" a few years ago, I found the biggest
| problem was that any snow sitting on top of our painted white
| lines seemed to harden. This would mean I'd hit them like
| they're a kerb and fall off my bike.
|
| Grip issues aside, cycling in the snow isn't too bad provided
| you have decent gloves.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yeah, also when raining - I generally just try to avoid
| painted lines to bike on.
|
| It's even worse here in SF with our metal thingies in the
| road.
| Grazester wrote:
| Had a friend that rode into school on 23rd Street all the way
| from Williamsburg Brooklyn. Only snow would stop this guy.
| Cold or rain couldn't. I thought he was nuts because I would
| have easily taken the train instead.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| I've noticed more an more "environmental" or "green" type
| politicans and activists seem to be very anti-progress? Has
| anyone else noticed this?
|
| For example, automated cars would allow you to park your car
| outside of the city, but still have car driving to get places.
| Get's criticized. Would allow for larger capital investments in
| cars (batteries etc). Just removing parking alone would free up
| so much space for either more efficient car transport or
| additional options (yes, bikes).
|
| Auto cars increase sharing opportunities as well. Reducing car
| ownership.
|
| Smaller / safer nuclear power research would be near totally
| CO2 emission free - but big fights against that or even
| exploring it - while talking about how serious climate change
| is?
|
| Carbon sequestration, storage, capture, ideas to drive global
| cooling - all shot down.
|
| I've come to think we may end up with a rich group of folks
| able / willing to invest in stuff creating a sort of second
| tier society (ie, clean water, air and temp control for them -
| the rest of us suffering).
|
| This path of emissions reductions can't be the only option
| worth exploring, even while we pursue it, start thinking of
| other ideas!
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| > I've noticed more an more "environmental" or "green" type
| politicans and activists seem to be very anti-progress?
|
| "Anti-progress" is a very loaded term. What one person views
| as progression, another may view as regression. Just labeling
| any opposition as "anti-progress" eliminates the nuance of
| any actual criticisms. For example:
|
| > Carbon sequestration, storage, capture, ideas to drive
| global cooling - all shot down.
|
| These aren't shut down because environmentalists just hate
| the inherent idea of technological countermeasures to global
| warming. Those ideas are fantastic... if they work. Most
| environmental activists would rather focus on things that we
| know will help (reducing energy usage, increasing green
| energy production), instead of gambling on undeveloped and
| unproven technology.
| mola wrote:
| How are automated cars and parking outside the city related?
|
| You can park your car outside the city, and use public
| transport, no self driving technology is required.
|
| It's not that that they are against progress, they are
| against shiny new things that don't make sense.
|
| Our need is less cars on the road. Not automated cars
| available per person in anytime of day. at most this will
| solve parking, but not congestion.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| This is where green folks aren't paying attention to what
| folks want.
|
| Go ahead and ban straws (put in the trash in the
| restaurant) while letting tons of plastic blow into the
| ocean from street litter.
|
| Some folks don't want to be on public transit, including
| liberals and definitely liberal elites (ie, COVID / crime /
| dirt / safety / whatever).
|
| There is no middle ground on the green / left. We all have
| to cram into public transit (I took it for a while, the bus
| would skip my stop if full, NO ONE took action on the
| clearly crazy idiots disrupting the ride forcing the bus to
| stop etc). Ideas like robotaxies are fought. Why? I don't
| get it.
|
| I'm also convinced many liberals / green folks are either
| very wealthy or don't live in tougher areas. It seems to be
| -> you take the bus, while I fly my private jet to talk
| about climate somewhere.
|
| Weirdly, it's going to be the ruthless capitlists, google,
| uber (ugh!), tesla (run by a bit of maniac) who are moving
| us forward.
|
| Little support locally. Ie, do a lane on highway dedicated
| for auto-drive truck trains and cars etc.
| jefftk wrote:
| "the bus would skip my stop if full"
|
| Minor, but the problem here is that the bus is full, not
| that it skips your stop. If there's no room on the bus,
| there's nothing it can do, so it might as well move
| faster.
|
| We should not be allowing buses to reach capacity, but
| this calls for more investment in public transit, not
| less.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| The issue with public transit is that
|
| a) its often out of my control in terms of options to fix
| it
|
| b) some things (violence) seem to have become accepted.
|
| c) there are a ton of (very) entrenched special interests
| which make touching any element of this difficult.
|
| Options like auto-cars put control in users hands, who
| can self organize if they want to car share etc.
| xmprt wrote:
| A full bus sounds like a great problem to have. Imagine
| if every single person in that bus decided to take a 4
| seater car to their destination instead.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| An autonomous car can drop you off at the train stop and
| then go to the parking lot. That's the same mileage as
| driving to the parking lot and then walking to the train
| stop but makes the commute far less soul crushing so more
| people can/will choose it.
| notahacker wrote:
| I don't think most people's resistance to using public
| transport is a two minute walk between the parking lot
| and the station entrance.
| wittycardio wrote:
| There's various factions amongst environmentalists,
| personally I'm very pro nuclear energy , carbon capture and
| self driving tech (to use outside Cities ideally) . But in
| some cases low tech solutions are actually better, for
| example walkable / bike able cities with good transit are
| amazing for quality of life and the environment.
| _jal wrote:
| > Has anyone else noticed this?
|
| That has been popular criticism going back at least to the
| 70s. Sometimes it is even true.
|
| Much more often, "anti-progress" is pretty meaningless code
| for "attacks things I like".
|
| I mean, make no mistake, there are all sorts of bad ideas in
| environmental circles, including some outright fascists. But
| nut-picking weirdos to brand anyone involved in environmental
| policy circles is just nasty propaganda, no different than
| calling all capitalists slavers.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| This is most politicians. They have to say one thing to get
| the votes from individual citizens but they have to actually
| do something else to get the money they need from the
| corporations and special interest groups that they need to
| actually campaign and travel and do all the other things that
| they seem to be able to do on a 170k salary. Politicians live
| like rich people but only get a middle class salary. To make
| up the difference they vote in a manner that will get their
| PAC's funded. Most of the time all politicians have to do is
| not do anything. Status quote means special interests are
| happy and money keeps flowing. End of the day this works well
| for the politicians, citizens don't care what they actually
| do as long as they have the correct letter next to their
| name, just what they say.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one
| will bike or walk and the demand for these vehicles would
| greatly strain the system. Not sure how you would account for
| it.
|
| Cities like Copenhagen perfectly demonstrate that people are
| still willing to bike even under harsh weathers. The main think
| you'd have to ensure in order to keep the use high during
| winter is to keep the cycling lanes safe by removing the snow
| within a reasonable time.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| In NYC they can't even remove the garbage, let alone the
| snow.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| If you can banish cars from cities to the extent you have
| described, there's not much incentive at that point to try and
| automate away the drivers. They wouldn't be randos any more,
| they'd be professionals, and it's going to be a while before
| automation catches up to the best drivers on the road.
| paxys wrote:
| The difference is European cities were established long before
| cars were a thing, so it's going to be a lot easier for them to
| go back to that model. American cities were all built around
| cars being the fundamental mode of transportation.
| moooo99 wrote:
| This is such a poor excuse. What you mentioned may apply to
| the comparatively small historic city centers of European
| city centers, but most certainly not to the decades of new
| construction during the car time. In fact, many city centers
| have been specifically re-worked to better accommodate cars
| as the primary mean of transport.
|
| Just look at pictures of Amsterdam in the 1970s [1], long
| before it became such a bike centric city. It is perfectly
| possible to do that in other European cities as well as
| American, especially given the increasing support for such
| measures.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/radentscheid_s/status/104577226157429
| 964...
| ahoy wrote:
| Thats just not true of NYC, Boston, DC, Philadelphia,
| Baltimore, and basically every other east coast city
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > European cities were established long before cars were a
| thing
|
| The small, touristy, beautiful medieval cores of many famous
| European cities are like this.
|
| The vast oceans of newer construction surrounding this core
| were made in just as much of a car-centric way as in the U.S.
|
| Here is the touristy area of Prague:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0841727,14.4275766,3a,75y,13.
| ..
|
| Here is what a normal street in Prague looks like, outside
| the tourist area: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0563622,14.
| 5390901,3a,75y,56...
|
| Here is a touristy part of Rome:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9058174,12.4832519,3a,75y,32.
| ..
|
| Normal street in Rome:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@41.915433,12.5445313,3a,75y,189.
| ..
| [deleted]
| jareklupinski wrote:
| snow day :)
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