[HN Gopher] S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxi...
___________________________________________________________________
S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are
'skyrocketing.'
Author : mikhael
Score : 184 points
Date : 2023-07-14 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sfchronicle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sfchronicle.com)
| stellalo wrote:
| I'm not sure looking at the absolute number of incidents is very
| informative. How did the total number of miles-per-day from
| autonomous vehicles vary in the same timespan?
| DragonStrength wrote:
| I left SF a year ago but had Cruise and Waymo cars in my
| neighborhood constantly. They were a total nuisance. They'd jerk
| towards pedestrians in crosswalks leading to this uncomfortable
| standoff where no one in the neighborhood would ever step in
| front of one. I'd wager any stats here are way lower than real
| incidences as I was nearly hit multiple times and never got to
| the "report it" stage as there are so many barriers to doing so.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| For what it's worth, my own anecdata is the opposite. My
| neighborhood (alamo square / wester addition) is rife with
| Cruise cars and I usually pass 2-3 every night while walking my
| dog for 30 minutes. They've been, without fail, polite and
| normal "drivers." I've not felt any concern walking in front of
| them in crosswalks or biking alongside them when leaving the
| neighborhood.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| My issues were mostly between Divisadero and Masonic north of
| the Panhandle, so different strokes. I was doing two half-
| hour walks per day during most of the pandemic, either to GGP
| or Alamo Square, so that's the context of my anecdata. Of
| course, no discounting they're just better now :)
| jb12 wrote:
| I live in the same neighborhood and saw one driving on the
| sidewalk a few weeks ago.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| New sport.. anyone in need of cash throws caution to the wind
| and temps ai cars to hit them for the payout.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| The state of the tech one year ago is probably not even worth
| talking about at this point, AI has advanced rapidly in the
| past year.
| rubyron wrote:
| They need a fake hand to rise up and wave over the steering
| wheel so pedestrians will know they're waiting for them.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| A visual indicator the car sees a pedestrian would be
| helpful.
| btown wrote:
| There's a lot of research on possibilities here! eHMIs
| (external human-machine interfaces) are the term.
|
| https://www.theturnsignalblog.com/blog/ehmi/
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/9/2912
|
| It's unclear that there's a consensus on something that
| reliably works across cultural contexts, though - which, to
| be fair, is also a problem with human-human interactions!
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| I have similar experiences (as a pedestrian) crossing in front
| of Cruise cars, especially at 4-way stops when there aren't
| crosswalks explicitly drawn. It's odd because the cars are
| generally excruciatingly cautious, but for some reason as I'm
| crossing they seem to calculate exactly how fast they can take
| off such that they pass me right as I'm clear of their path --
| whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the
| sidewalk before passing.
|
| What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to
| pick it up? But also, given that they have all those cameras, I
| wouldn't dare do anything "unusual" like that because it'd
| probably run me over and say it was my fault, and here's the
| proof.
|
| I don't doubt the cars' ability to calculate it exactly, but
| it's a different experience for sure.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Sounds risky.
|
| I thought California law was to let the pedestrian fully
| cross, but apparently not:
|
| > In California, the law does not state that a driver must
| wait for the pedestrian to fully exit the crosswalk or the
| street before they proceed on their way in their lane. A
| pedestrian must be safely out of the driver's path of travel
| for them to begin driving again.
| floren wrote:
| If you had to wait for all pedestrians to be out of the
| crosswalk, there's plenty of places where turning would be
| essentially impossible -- and there's an argument to be
| made that anywhere with that much foot traffic ought to be
| turned into a pedestrian-only zone, well, right now there
| are both cars and pedestrians and requiring the crosswalk
| be clear before going would make things even worse.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| NY prohibits driving in the occupied half of a crosswalk.
| i.e. from center line to the curb. This is almost
| impossible to obey in NYC with heavy ped flows but it is
| a sensible way to combat drivers clipping you from
| behind.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach
| the sidewalk before passing.
|
| You're joking right? No one wait for you to clear the street.
| Hell most driving start advancing when you're going to be
| clear by the time they make it to you.
|
| > What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned
| around to pick it up?
|
| Same thing a human would; hit you or slam on the brakes.
| They'll just do it faster and harder.
| lanstin wrote:
| Not in San Jose. A few drivers will only wait for you to
| cross their half but they are an asshole minority and at
| any rate are not aiming to minimize things.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _> whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to
| reach the sidewalk before passing.
|
| You're joking right? No one wait for you to clear the
| street. Hell most driving start advancing when you're going
| to be clear by the time they make it to you.
|
| > What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned
| around to pick it up?
|
| Same thing a human would; hit you or slam on the brakes.
| They'll just do it faster and harder._
|
| The real world isn't like a Mad Max film.
| cozzyd wrote:
| that sounds very harrowing. I don't think we have any of
| these cars in Chicago, but I'd be hesitant to push my
| daughter's stroller in front of one...
| opportune wrote:
| I have the opposite experience, I live by a bunch of 4way
| stops that drivers get very pushy about if you try to use as
| a pedestrian. The driverless cars never put me in a dangerous
| situation at those intersections but human driven cars do
| very frequently.
| tiahura wrote:
| GPT 4 can't be trusted to set the menu for dinner without
| supervision, but we aren't expecting all sorts of wacky carnage
| by setting pre-alpha KITT loose on the streets?
| satisfice wrote:
| These companies cannot be trusted to be honest about incidents or
| near incidents. They like to crow about safety, but the safety
| they want credit for is entirely hypothetical.
|
| There is no good reason to believe that autonomous vehicles are
| actually safer. They haven't yet been tested enough, and the
| testing that has been done cannot be generalized to new
| situations.
|
| I believe they would be safer if all roads were fully digitized,
| controlled, with no pedestrians and no other human drivers. We
| have something like that, now, called railroads.
|
| Mass transit is the better investment.
| __loam wrote:
| They are already required to report every accident to a public
| agency in California.
|
| And the safety is not hypothetical. Waymo is driving millions
| of miles a month in places like Phoenix. They have a ton of
| data to support the fact that their cars are significantly
| safer than human drivers.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Laws are written and designed for humans who constantly try to
| push it to the limit and get away with things. These cars are all
| over the place and I've been caught stuck on a street in Bernal
| Heights because it couldn't quite fit and just froze in place. I
| had to back out of the street because there wasn't any room for
| me to go around it.
|
| Yes it may be following laws to the letter, but not only was I
| grumpy about having to carefully back out of a street, there
| wasn't any way to communicate with the car. It doesn't have any
| feedback mechanism for me, so it just looks like a confused dead
| robot in the middle of the street.
|
| I think Waymo and Cruise are both happily working on hard
| problems in this space with limitless VC funding (or daddy GM
| money) thrown their way. So I support their efforts, because at
| the very least, they'll enrich our understanding of self-driving
| cars even if it were to fail in the marketplace long term.
|
| I'm curious how profitable it will be in practice once the VC
| money dries up. Paying half a million dollar salaries to
| employees who need to keep these things up to date adds up. That,
| on top of hardware costs for precise sensors that will fail fast
| in harsh weather conditions. On top of normal wear and tear of
| people in and out of the cars all day for cars that won't need
| down time.
|
| Lastly, I'll end my thoughts with this... why are we obsessed
| with the idea of self driving cars anyway?! What human problem
| does this solve? I am 100% on board with building autonomous
| cruise-control for my own car, so I'm not against the tech. I
| just find the taxi angle to be weird. All I see so far in my mind
| is a product that just takes away an entire class of job
| opportunities with no actual gain.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| We can drive people and goods around without having a human
| waste his time driving stuff around. Not wasting money paying
| people to do stupid stuff is gigantic gain.
| jarjoura wrote:
| The person the tech is replacing will still need to work and
| earn a wage to afford the goods the system that replaced them
| is delivering. It's not replacing a relatively high risk job
| or allowing that driver to scale themselves and improve their
| efficiency in any way. It's just eliminating their job,
| because.
|
| As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having
| someone in the car who might improve the journey slightly by
| being an interesting person to chat with, I'll likely sit in
| the car all alone. Worse, I'll probably be shoved ads in my
| face. So, this new taxi doesn't really add anything new of
| value to me as a consumer.
|
| I know automated systems have replaced all kinds of jobs, and
| the closest analogy I can think of is self-check out lines at
| grocery stores, or ATM machines before that. However, those
| actually did free up cashiers so they could wander the store
| and help out in other ways, or restock, or funny enough, help
| someone self-check out.
|
| Taxis are kind of an island to themselves, and not only will
| this impact the driver who won't have anything related to
| jump to, it will hurt the businesses who rely on drivers
| waiting for the next passenger. Then there's the urban
| centers these cars are zipping around in. These cars have no
| employee to generate business tax revenue from, so the cars
| are consuming infrastructure for no benefit to the cities.
|
| Anyway, thanks for reading my random thoughts. I'm sure
| things will balance out in the end, but if you work in the
| industry and have some cool insights, feel free to share.
| waldohatesyou wrote:
| Isn't the gain that those folks can find another job that's
| more useful?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Isn't the gain that those folks can find another job that's
| more useful?_
|
| What makes you think that if finding another job that they
| are capable of doing was so easy they wouldn't have already
| done so? Because they were waiting for some tech billionaire
| to throw them on the unemployment line?
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| No, they wouldn't have already done so, because their
| current job still exists and it's easier to maintain the
| status quo.
|
| Major structural employment changes don't happen overnight.
| This will take decades. AVs will decrease the demand for
| Uber drivers, but it doesn't mean they will all be out of a
| job overnight, just that incentives will slowly push
| workers towards other jobs.
| [deleted]
| nashashmi wrote:
| At some point we will need separate emergency technologies to
| deal with automated vehicles as a fill in for exceptional cases.
| the situations described here are such cases
| dmode wrote:
| I really think incidents by autonomous cars are the least of SF's
| problems
| parl_match wrote:
| I'm wary about using public roads to test these, but I think the
| way the data is presented is misleading. I'm not sure how it's
| misleading, but separating "incidents" into categories (safety,
| traffic, accident, etc) might be a good start.
|
| For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these
| numbers to skyrocket. While that's an inconvenience to other
| drivers, it's not a safety issue at all.
|
| By the way, as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad
| driving), I find Uber/Lyft/Food drivers to be both much more
| dangerous and inconveniencing than these self driving cars. We
| should have scrutiny on the safety of these machines, but they're
| hardly the biggest problem facing SF.
| notakio wrote:
| I moved out of SF ~2018, and only recently revisited, and the
| increased frequency with which I saw robocars was immediately
| concerning to me, largely based on the potential for things to
| go wrong, and with just how frequent they were.
|
| My second thought was, after hearing friends and family still
| there echo nothing for disdain for them, "how long before
| someone starts setting these on fire?" as some sort of nuisance
| campaign against the things. Turns out, 1) you don't need fire,
| and 2) not that long, since the cone thing started happening
| about a week afterwards.
| standardUser wrote:
| I know this is a tired argument, but it's not wrong: There is
| equal or greater cause for concern with cars driven by
| people, we're just used to those horrors and reluctant to
| trade them for a different set of horrors, even if they are
| conclusively less horrible.
|
| I lived carless in downtown SF for 10 years, usually with a
| walking commute, and it was not pleasant. Packed streets full
| of angry, stressed drivers honking and swerving and
| practically revving their engines as lights change so they
| can gun it past cyclists and pedestrians down the next narrow
| street. Anyone trying to replace these agro drivers with
| marginally-safer robots has my support.
| more_corn wrote:
| Uber performed self driving car tests in downtown San
| Francisco for a bit. I personally saw an error where self
| driving cars turning right on red failed to yield to
| pedestrians in the crosswalk who had right of way.
|
| It was a bug. The driver looped and tried again while I was
| standing there and it happened again. It was an incident.
| It was a safety incident. Getting killed by a robot
| breaking the rules is no less dead than if it were a human.
| And there's no comfort in the thought that it might happen
| less often with a robot driving.
|
| Your argument that human drivers suck commits the fallacy
| of whataboutism. Your argument that not all incidents are
| safety incidents is misleading.
|
| There are safety incidents they're unacceptable.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > turning right on red failed to yield to pedestrians in
| the crosswalk who had right of way.
|
| > Getting killed by a robot breaking the rules is no less
| dead than if it were a human.
|
| This "fail to yield to pedistrians" happens way way way
| too much though! At least the bug in the robo-taxi could,
| in theory of course, eventually be fixed. The bug in the
| human drivers will certainly never be fixed, since this
| has been a frequent problem since forever and will
| continue to be a problem as long as human drives (or
| maybe the USA can just give up on right turns on red like
| much of the rest of the world).
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > Your argument that human drivers suck commits the
| fallacy of whataboutism.
|
| No, it doesn't. Self-driving cars are potential
| substitutes for human-driven cars. If self-driving cars
| cause fewer injuries/accidents/etc. per mile driven, then
| everyone will be safer if we replace human-driven cars
| with them. If you object to self-driving cars being on
| the road even if they're safer than human-driven cars,
| you are implicitly saying that your preference is for
| more people to be injured.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Wow. This is an argument.
|
| You start with a common, but controversial hypothetical,
| that in the future self-driving cars may be safer than
| humans, and then conclude with that opposing self-driving
| cars today, which of course are not the hypothetical
| safer than humans car, is advocating for actual humans to
| be injured or killed.
|
| That's some real undergrad level bullshit.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| No, you just didn't read what I wrote. At no point did I
| assert anything about the relative safety of self driving
| cars. I said that if you oppose self-driving cars EVEN IF
| they're safer...
|
| That's called the conditional. It means that I'm not
| saying that thing is true; rather, it means that I am
| saying that if we take that thing to be true, then
| something follows logically.
|
| The concept of things being conditional is pretty simple,
| so I guess in that sense it's undergrad level.
| ameister14 wrote:
| It doesn't commit the fallacy of whataboutism - it's the
| same issue and a direct substitute.
|
| Any safety incident is unacceptable is not a realistic
| standard, and I am not sure why a lower rate of incident
| is not a convincing argument for you. Yes, getting killed
| by a robot leaves you no less dead, but if 5 people are
| killed by robots where 10 people would have been killed
| by people, isn't that a net positive?
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| If 10 people were killed by people, then there could be
| 10 wrongful-death lawsuits and 10 car insurance claims
| and 10 cases of liability and 10 criminal investigations
| and 10 driver's licenses sanctioned, where each and every
| human behind the wheel must accept responsibility and
| assume liability for the harm caused to other human
| beings, and/or property.
|
| If 5 people are killed by SDCs, then 5 executors will
| need to visit our website, create an account, and submit
| a request for reimbursement for funeral expenses. Please
| upload your death certificate and all itemized receipts.
| Our best AI will absolutely make its best efforts to find
| out which remote human operator caused those cars to
| begin driving, and then we will launch an internal
| investigation into whether their pay should be cut, or
| maybe we'll put them on paid leave instead and connect
| them with a grief counselor. Thank you for choosing
| WayMo. Scan this QR code to install our app!
| greiskul wrote:
| So you are saying that you are completely fine with 5
| more people being killed, if their family gets money? I
| don't think thats as ethical a position as you think it
| is. You are putting human burocracy ahead of human lives.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| It's not about "getting money". It's about recourse to
| the law, it's about humans who take responsibility, and
| it's about properly assigning liability. A single human
| life is precious and worth more than gold; you can't put
| a price on a human life. But in human burocracys, they do
| that. Perhaps it would be more just if the human drivers
| were killed in retribution? Death penalty for vehicular
| manslaughter? I mean, the families don't have to get
| money. Instead they could just receive front-row tickets
| in the lethal injection chamber? Is that more just, with
| less burocracy? We could destroy the cars that kill
| people, too. How's that? You could crush the car up in a
| compactor, then extract all the valuable minerals and
| other material, and award it to the families of the
| deceased.
|
| Look greiskul, I don't appreciate your attempt to set up
| a Trolley Problem with my ridiculous and hypothetical
| scenario that will totally never happen in real life. My
| comment was intended to highlight the difference of human
| responsibility, assignment of liability, and recourse to
| legal means when someone is wronged. Just because the
| numbers were different in the GP, doesn't change my
| scenario one iota if you make it 10 and 10, or if you
| make it 6 minorities and 10 white male landowners, or if
| you make it 101 Dalmatians and a breeding pair of
| _Tyrannosauri Rex_. That wasn 't the point.
|
| greiskul, I'll thank you not to make insinuations about
| my ethical beliefs, especially when those insinuations
| serve your Trolley Problem agenda. I'm not making an
| ethical judgement on the state of things today here, I'm
| simply describing the situation as I see it. The justice
| system in these United States is set up a certain way,
| along with insurance adjusters, and the DMV/DOT, and the
| auto manufacturers and all the regulatory agencies that
| handle them. Since human dignity is inviolable, and a
| human life is priceless, I concur that it appears immoral
| for an insurance company to put a price on that human
| life, especially a lowball, profitable price.
|
| They say that "money can't buy happiness" but it's a lot
| more comfortable to do my crying in a Mercedes than on a
| bicycle.
|
| Unfortunately, SDCs are an excellent method to remove
| human dignity and living beings from the equation. For
| better or worse, the roads will be increasingly
| automated, and there will be fewer humans taking
| responsibility for their actions on the road.
| Corporations are people, though, so let's just give them
| the right to vote and be done with it?
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| You're introducing a new claim, that it will be harder
| for families to have justice and be compensated when a
| death is caused by a robotaxi rather than a human. I
| don't see any reason to assume this. If anything, it
| ought to be easier to get a rich, large, well known
| corporate robotaxi company to provide compensation than a
| random individual who might even be driving uninsured
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| That's not my only claim. The additional gotcha is that
| the supposedly responsible human being is remote from the
| incident, and the regulators may find it more difficult
| to determine responsibility and assign liability to
| someone somewhere inside some very large company with a
| lot of network connectivity and an equal helping of
| plausible deniability. Compare that with a human at the
| wheel who hopefully carries a driver's license and proof
| of insurance?
|
| Anyway, a "rich, large, well-known" company is always
| going to calculate the cost of a human life taken, vs.
| the cost of doing business, and run the margin right up
| to a rounding error. I don't doubt that their actuaries
| are just as good as GEICO's.
|
| Lest we forget - _corporations are people_.
| skeaker wrote:
| This is not an argument (your situation is non-existent
| and fallacious) so you've more or less lost this debate
| here, but I'll give that it was funny.
| notakio wrote:
| I have no dog in this fight. If anything, my final takeaway
| was that my impressions were entirely anecdotal and/or
| experiential, and not based on any sort of legitimate
| analysis with useful data. It should probably be done, but
| my point was more that it's only getting more complicated
| as people take action based on their perception, whether
| that perception is supported rationally or not. So now, on
| top of a reasonably already complex engineering problem is
| an additional layer to correct for: irrational human
| reaction.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I don't think that complicates anything from a policy
| perspective. If self-driving cars are good (i.e. safer
| than human drivers), we should be rolling them out. If a
| small number of people interfere with them or damage
| them, we should just arrest those people and prosecute
| them for the relevant crimes. I don't think that
| vandalism of self-driving cars is going to be a serious
| issue long term, given that anyone vandalizing them is
| going to be on camera, plus people will just get used to
| them and find other things to be mad about.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >There is equal or greater cause for concern with cars
| driven by people
|
| No there isn't. Driverless cars drive under a fraction of
| the conditions and in self selected locations precisely
| because the tech is still shoddy. Not to mention they only
| function at all because they're vastly outnumbered by
| humans who know how to respond to them.
|
| Let's do an actual experiment to compare. 100% driverless
| cars with current tech, from different companies on all
| road conditions that humans drive on during busy hours in a
| city and see how that goes. To even attempt to compare
| driverless cars to human drivers without seeing the
| dynamics of a non-trivial amount of them interacting, which
| humans need to do all the time, is meaningless.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| That's not really true. They now do drive the entirety of
| San Francisco, 24/7, in all weather conditions. I think
| it's a pretty apples to apples comparison.
|
| The one point where I agree is there aren't as many of
| them as there are human cars, and it's possible that in
| large numbers there could be some unintended
| consequences. Think 1000 of them getting stuck at the
| same location. There should be provisions limiting how
| fast they can scale up to make sure that doesn't happen.
| hadlock wrote:
| Given the millions of miles driven since the start and a
| single pedestrian death in 2018, I would hesitate to call
| the tech shoddy. SF alone has 20-30 pedestrian deaths per
| year despite their well funded and almost completely
| ineffectual "vision zero" program. If there's been a
| second pedestrian fatality since I can't find it online.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Depending on driverless taxis instead of having emotional
| people who need parking all the time seems to be a win, as
| long as they are safe _and someone is held accountable when
| they mess up_.
|
| I am very unwilling to change 'people are flawed but
| (mostly) held accountable' to 'a corporation owned robot
| car ran someone over because of a software glitch and it is
| nobody's fault'. The problems with 'oops we got hacked or
| lost your data or locked you out of a service or deprecated
| a product because we spend no money on things that are not
| income generating' can not be passed on to such a system.
| tlb wrote:
| Suppose it's the near future and driverless cars are
| causing 5x fewer injuries per mile than human drivers.
| (5x fewer != 0, so some injuries and deaths still occur)
|
| What accountability would you like to see in that
| situation?
|
| Or a table of | relative death rate |
| accountability |
|
| would cover the widest range of future scenarios.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| If there is an investigation and if it is found that
| someone said 'don't bother with those tests just push to
| market' or 'let's fire the legacy system patching team
| because they make no money even though the cars are still
| driving around' and that caused directly or indirectly a
| car to glitch and run someone over or to get hacked and
| used for a crime then someone goes to prison and/or the
| company gets liquidated or something in between that is
| reasonable to ensure that it is not tempting for another
| company to do it again.
|
| I am not a lawyer or a legislator and I cannot come with
| a regulation or law or something that would do this, but
| I am sure someone can.
| __loam wrote:
| It's a lot easier to hold a single corporation
| accountible than it is for the distributed responsibility
| of individuals. Uber killed someone and they had to leave
| the industry. Tesla is being actively investigated for
| their fly by night approach.
|
| Additionally, when one of these cars fucks up, these
| companies know exactly what happened because they are
| collecting data about the cars performance 24/7.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > Additionally, when one of these cars fucks up, these
| companies know exactly what happened because they are
| collecting data about the cars performance 24/7.
|
| And if it turns out they had data that showed that they
| knew someone was gonna get killed, but they would make
| more money not fixing the bug -- I would want someone to
| go to jail.
| szundi wrote:
| Then no one is going to implement it probably. Or is it
| just jail time when dead are more than with humans?
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| > For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause
| these numbers to skyrocket.
|
| Google could get tough about that. If you have Google Play
| Services on your phone, they know who you are. "Your Google
| account has been terminated for violation of Google's terms of
| service."
| akira2501 wrote:
| > I'm not sure how it's misleading, but separating "incidents"
| into categories
|
| The premise is that these vehicles would be unilaterally
| "better" than human drivers and that would justify their
| creation and use. If that's not the case, then perhaps we need
| to fully reevaluate the value proposition here.
|
| > While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a
| safety issue at all.
|
| It hasn't proved to be a safety issue _yet_. We don't actually
| have enough data to forecast with here. I see this as a safety
| signal with troubling implications.
|
| > as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad driving)
|
| This is another safety signal I would be wary of... unless
| "hyper annoyed" is just hyperbole for it's own sake.
|
| > We should have scrutiny on the safety of these machines, but
| they're hardly the biggest problem facing SF.
|
| The problem with automation is small problems have a tendency
| to combine into massive emergent problems once you start
| scaling your fleet up.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > The problem with automation is small problems have a
| tendency to combine into massive emergent problems once you
| start scaling your fleet up.
|
| Not in this case, no. Every driver has a small problem. Each
| ai driver is just another driver, replacing some driver.
|
| Unless the ai driver problem is not small but actually quite
| big, I don't see how automation economics would worsen the
| situation. On the contrary, them all being identical and
| automated makes fixing the small problems much more viable.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Except Humans are dynamic and the AI is pre-programmed. So
| Humans can _react_ to emergent conditions whereas AI is
| completely subsumed by it.
|
| There's a good hint here that when Waymo cars "break down"
| a remote Human operator takes over. If your view is
| correct, this could never work.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| In light of whats happening right this moment with
| AI/GPTs, I am not sure if you are being ironic or not.
|
| If so, well played.
| paxys wrote:
| > For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause
| these numbers to skyrocket
|
| And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on
| public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day
| situations, not just the happy path. It seems like almost every
| day I run into some Cruise or Waymo (mostly Cruise) vehicle
| stuck in the middle of the street blocking traffic, and that
| should not be excused as "oh it's just learning".
|
| Self driving car companies love to release reports comparing
| themselves against regular drivers when it comes to collisions
| and deaths, but conveniently skip over every other aspect of
| driving. The way things are today, if we continue to release
| more and more of them into San Francisco it will basically lead
| up to a total traffic deadlock, and yet people will still keep
| repeating "oh but they kill 0.1 fewer people per million miles
| so it's an improvement".
| veec_cas_tant wrote:
| > And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving
| on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-
| to-day situations, not just the happy path
|
| Are you considering someone putting a traffic cone on a
| vehicle a day-to-day situation?
| paxys wrote:
| What would you do if you were stopped at an intersection
| and someone put a traffic cone in front of you? Sit there
| for the rest of your life blocking everyone behind you, or
| move it/drive around it? Same for literally every example
| that deviates from the happy path, no matter how minor.
| Construction work, something fallen on the road, a delivery
| van stopped on the side, temporary street closures. These
| cars are nowhere close to being intelligent enough to
| handle city driving, and won't be for a very long time.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I like that you're getting downvoted but actually being
| able to react to these situations is a good skill to
| have.
| scarmig wrote:
| It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up
| to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the
| hood, and run away. Would most people try to shake it off
| while driving away, or stop in the middle of traffic?
| What's actually the right thing to do, both as a person
| and as an AV?
|
| More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up
| and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles,
| intentionally to confuse or disrupt the driver? Or should
| they be punished?
| loandbehold wrote:
| Putting cone on self driving car is vandalism and should
| be punished accordingly. Self driving companies have
| footage of people doing it. Is SFPD looking for these
| people? Self driving companies shouldn't need to be able
| to deal with criminals trying to actively disable it.
| These cars weren't designed to drive in a warzone. Most
| businesses are not able to operate when criminals try to
| actively interfere with its operations. Some basic level
| of law and order is required for modern society to exist.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Vandalism in California requires "maliciously damaging,
| destroying or defacing someone else's property". A cone
| on a hood does none of those things.
|
| It _might_ be some other crime, but we can 't slap people
| with charges that won't stick in a court of law.
|
| The counterpoint to the argument is that you shouldn't be
| deploying deadly machinery on public roads with no
| ability to handle common issues and expecting it to be a
| problem for the SFPD/CHP.
| brigade wrote:
| They put the cone on the hood, it's not an obstacle on
| the road. The car could try to shake it off, maybe, but
| is shaking it into the middle of the street and creating
| an obstacle really the right move? Should self-driving
| cars be required to have a robotic arm capable of moving
| a traffic cone from a car surface to the sidewalk to
| handle this specific situation?
|
| Also the anti-car activists can easily move on to a wide
| variety of other methods to obstruct sensors.
| civilitty wrote:
| I think the answer is quite obvious: require self driving
| cars to have a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm that
| folds into the front of the car.
|
| It can be used to remove traffic cones and clothesline
| cyclists!
| silisili wrote:
| If we can have it give a little shake or window knock to
| the car in front of me, stopped at the light that's
| turned green, checking texts - consider me on board!
| tlb wrote:
| They handle some crazy situations.
| https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1641123102858919953
| jmoss20 wrote:
| > It seems like almost every day I run into some Cruise or
| Waymo (mostly Cruise) vehicle stuck in the middle of the
| street blocking traffic
|
| ...really?
|
| I've seen this maybe once or twice, total. Is there really
| some part of town where this is a daily occurrence?
| vm wrote:
| I've seen this multiples times on Embarcadero between the
| Ferry Building and 280 ramp
| splonk wrote:
| I wouldn't call it daily from my observations, but it's
| common enough in the Mission that it's not a surprise (I'm
| probably within a mile of the garages that Cruise and Waymo
| use).
| dekhn wrote:
| During the height of Critical Mass, bicyclists would surround
| minivans and keep them from leaving. Drivers don't know what
| to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and
| injure a cyclist. I don't expect self-driving cars to deal
| any better with cones, or any hostile action towards a car.
| Vecr wrote:
| That's an ambush, are the self defense laws there that bad?
| dekhn wrote:
| Uhhh... if you're surrounding by multiple layers of
| cyclists and try to drive your way out hitting a few
| cyclists, the cyclists are going to swarm your car and
| kill you.
|
| To be fair, I think this only happened a few times and it
| was caused by a small number of bad players, while the
| majority of Critical Mass participants were ethically (if
| somewhat inconveniently) demonstrating their collective
| power.
| sroussey wrote:
| What happens when you cross an autonomous car and stand-
| your-ground gun laws? Through in some citizens united
| where a corporation is a person, and you might have cars
| that fight back...
|
| 8)
| golergka wrote:
| Passenger of autonomous car certainly is a person.
| yard2010 wrote:
| The future must be interesting, I feel bad we only get to
| see the 20's, like whoever lived in the 20's in the last
| century and died before the 70's saw nothing!
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I've participated and watched critical mass any number of
| times. I've never seen cyclists target cars randomly.
|
| The only time you will be surrounded in a minivan is if you
| try to drive through the cyclists, or otherwise act
| aggressively or unsafely.
|
| Critical mass is a protest movement. If you drive your
| vehicle into the middle of a protest against vehicles in a
| way that puts people in danger, don't be surprised when
| people react defensively.
|
| > Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too
| hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist.
|
| They should do nothing. You cannot knock over a cyclist in
| a stationary car.
| dekhn wrote:
| The situtations I'm describing (covered in the press at
| the time) were not defensive- they were actively
| offensive. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicts_in
| volving_Critical_M...
|
| Swarming a car and preventing it from moving- sure, the
| safest thing for the car to do is stop driving, but... I
| don't think that's really a good defense of
| confrontational bikers.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| You should read through the link you just posted.
|
| Most of the incidents involving cars were instigated by
| the drivers of cars. I couldn't find an instance where a
| car wasn't trying to ride through the cyclists, or the
| driver hadn't picked a fight.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| You should read through the link you just posted.
|
| Most of the incidents involving cars were instigated by
| the drivers of cars. I couldn't find an instance where a
| car wasn't trying to ride through the cyclists, or the
| driver hadn't picked a fight.
| dmix wrote:
| The two critical mass's I participated in blocking
| traffic was limited to everyone passing through an
| intersection and then continuing on. Annoying for drivers
| no doubt but never as egregious as locking someone in
| specifically for an extended amount of time.
|
| The riders tend to move pretty quickly so it was at most
| a few minutes and never swarming vehicles to a
| standstill.
| medellin wrote:
| Depending where someone put a cone on my car i would possibly
| just run them over or drive off unsafely if i felt that it
| was an attempt to rob me or steal my car.
|
| Having things like that categorized differently makes sense
| because it's caused by humans being dicks. But maybe you are
| right and that is the new reality we live in where none of us
| get to advance because of a small group of angry and stupid
| people.
| jrmg wrote:
| Man, and further up this post there was someone talking
| about running over groups of cyclists if they maliciously
| surrounded their car.
|
| Try to remain calm. You're generally not allowed to just
| _murder_ people who attempt to inconvenience, detain, or
| rob you, even though they are 'being dicks'. That's not how
| crime is dealt with in a stable society. It's not a 'new
| reality'.
|
| I really hope we're not devolving into a place where more
| people think this way...
| nemo44x wrote:
| Equally we seem to be devolving to a place where more
| people think doing things like this is ok. The solution
| isn't to run them over - your advice to remain calm is
| good.
|
| But we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally
| block traffic. Prison and life altering fines are a first
| step. This will absolutely deter this type of behavior.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| You want life-altering fines and prison for
| inconveniencing cars? Do you think the US judicial system
| is at all capable of applying this fairly? That law would
| exist for a day before someone deemed "undesirable" is
| arrested for not getting across the street faster than
| the crosswalk signal.
|
| Mental breakdown in the street? Jail Cyclist riding in a
| way the cops don't like? Jail Grandma can't get her
| wheelchair up the curb ramp? Jail
| m00x wrote:
| While it is an incredibly shitty thing to do, that does not
| give you the right to murder someone.
| __loam wrote:
| It's a lot higher than 0.1 people. 40 people died in SF last
| year due to traffic accidents. I've yet to hear about a self
| driving car killing someone despite how many there are in the
| city.
|
| I also disagree that coning a self-driving car's sensor is a
| "regular day to day situation". Throwing paint on someone's
| windshield or slashing their tires is a crime.
|
| E: making stat accurate
| dekhn wrote:
| Your numbers are wrong:
| https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-
| fataliti... In 2022 (the year with the most), there were
| 40, not hundreds.
|
| Please try to keep your stats as honest as possible.
| __loam wrote:
| My bad. Still 40 more than self-driving cars.
| dekhn wrote:
| It looks like neither Waymo or Cruise has driven enough
| miles (>70M miles driven per fatality) to really expect
| to see a fatality if the SDCs are roughly the same as an
| average driver?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| > Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their
| safety track records
|
| Also, Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records.
| I'll believe the city officials in this case, since they actually
| have some data. The car companies just have hand waves.
| scarmig wrote:
| > Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records.
|
| This is not true. They monthly release accidents and
| disengagement reports to the state.
|
| SF officials, on the other hand, have been caught more or less
| fabricating a story and misusing data. From the Public
| Utilities Commission, which oversees the process and AV
| companies are required to report all incidents to:
|
| > Regarding collision responsibility, San Francisco's analysis
| appears to omit or overlook relevant facts present in the data
| and collision narratives that are critical for understanding
| the context of the cited incidents. The examples of two injury
| collisions upon which it seems San Francisco bases its analysis
| of Waymo's relative injury collision rate (included below in
| Appendix A as entries for June 2022 and July 2022) are
| problematic in this regard. According to Waymo's account as
| submitted to NHTSA, the June 2022 collision does not appear to
| involve any contact with the Waymo AV. indicates the Waymo AV
| was rear-ended by another vehicle, which immediately left the
| scene. Note that no determination of fault, of the AV or
| otherwise, is evident through these reports.
|
| (https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/K..
| .)
| m00x wrote:
| They include incidents where the car has caused traffic
| disruption. Recently, people have been throwing cones on top of
| the cars causing them to stop and impede traffic. This includes
| SF city officials, which is wild.
|
| Look for #weekofcone on Twitter.
| damnesian wrote:
| The incidents mentioned in the story would have been shared via
| first responder dispatchers. Seems like the way forward here
| would be for the city to make this data available to all
| driverless cars- maybe some sort of data registration with the
| city- and for the vendors to make it possible to drop these new
| hazards into the cars' maps promptly. I don't know how these
| systems work, or if they can work together, but I can write a
| computer program and there is clearly a looping input that is
| lacking in this system.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Mapping apps (Google/Wayze) already have a reporting feature
| for accidents and hazards, it doesn't seem like that big a leap
| to either providing first responders with something like or
| creating some kind of gamified crowd sourced version.
| shtopointo wrote:
| Can anybody find the data set from which they created the graph?
|
| I tried browsing https://data.sfgov.org/browse but there's
| nothing that immediately refers to "autonomous vehicles",
| "incidents" or the like...
|
| (I'm trying to piece the data together for myself, and I'm a bit
| suspicious that their graph stops in April. I'd also want to
| cross reference to number of vehicles on the road, because if
| there's been a ramp up since e.g. January, you would expect more
| incidents to happen).
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Given that in any high traffic environment driving is as much a
| _social_ problem as anything else, it should be no surprise that
| anything short of Artificial _General_ Intelligence cannot cope
| and causes disruption.
|
| Considering how little progress has been made with AGI to date,
| perhaps it's time to call off the self driving experiment.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| My kneejerk was to say, yeah 1->3 is a tripling. In modern
| journalistic terms that is 'skyrocketing'.
|
| Then I read TFA. Yep 30->90. 'skyrocketing'.
|
| That's not to say it isn't concerning. The downed wire incident
| that is the highlight of the story seems quite bad. But human
| drivers do much, much worse things, with very high frequency.
| Weekly sideshows, for example. The article is very unfair.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| I'm on the streets of SF for hours a day, every day, mostly on
| bicycle. Often at night, when these AVs are at their peak
| output. The difference in their behavior is scary noticeable,
| especially within the last 30 days. I'm very curious about the
| programming reason behind it.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| i have no basis for this guess, but i'd suppose it's more
| miles being driven, not a significant programming update.
|
| <checking>
|
| yep, TFA linkes to another article that there was a recent
| significant increase in miles driven.
|
| i guess that doesn't necessarily jibe with your perception of
| a noticeable difference in singular behavior, but our brains
| do funny things. when you buy a certain new make of car,
| suddenly you wonder why so many of them are on the road.
| (they always were)
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| But in this case, everyone seems to agree that behavior
| changed, and data about incident reports matches it. It
| matches my experience too. It wasn't a subtle change.
| Cruise cars rapidly went from being timid and predictable
| to unpredictable.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| Beware: the State sent a letter accusing the city of manipulating
| data in order to make AVs looks more dangerous than they were:
| https://twitter.com/annatonger/status/1673403230804385813
|
| > In the 4 Waymo traffic collisions SF cited to prove driverless
| cars are less safe, 3 were the Waymos being rear-ended and 1
| didn't even involve any cars touching, CA says.
| https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/K...
| fnord77 wrote:
| * * *
| dekhn wrote:
| "Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to
| support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as
| possible.
|
| When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a
| very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket,
| basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence
| to support a massive change in incidents.
|
| Remember: reality is banal. Things are far better explained by
| sampling error, bias, and base rates, than they are by sudden,
| dramatic shifts caused by a single factor.
| babl-yc wrote:
| The SF Chronicle has an unfortunate habit of headlines telling
| you "what to feel" as opposed to "what happened".
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| I'm with ya normally, but literally a few paragraphs in they
| have the chart source: the TA, going from 3 to 91 "incidents"
| over a year. If you turn it on its side, it kinda looks like
| rocket blasting off.
| dekhn wrote:
| That's not a rocket blasting off, it's a rocket failing to
| reach orbit by barely clearing the launch platform.
|
| More importantly: that chart isn't normalized by miles
| driven. As the companies have been ramping up, you'd expect
| (under a random model) that incidents would go up.
|
| It could also be explained by greater knowledge of SDCs,
| increased news coverage, and more awareness of how to report
| incidents.
|
| More importantly, I wasn't considering the chart, I was
| considering what the source of the quote said:
|
| Julia Friedlander, SFMTA's senior manager of automated
| driving policy, told state regulators in late June that
| driverless taxi incidents began "skyrocketing" this year.
| Though city leaders suspect it coincides with a rise in
| driverless activity, Friedlander said the city can't make
| definitive conclusions because it doesn't have detailed data.
| mediumdeviation wrote:
| Per mile incident rate is a measure only the companies care
| about. Why wouldn't the city care about an increase in the
| total number of traffic incidents? Especially when the
| self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at
| the end of the day the roads are getting less safe.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you have alternate information, it's better to offer it
| than to describe what it could look like hypothetically.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You can normalize the report by miles driven, but if the
| number of miles driven by those services increases rapidly
| then you can expect the number of incidents to increase
| just as rapidly, and that is what appears to be happening.
| There is a level at which this becomes untenable and that
| level is a direct function of the number of miles driven.
|
| So unless you see some kind of cap to the number of miles
| driven (which given the ambition to scale up is not
| something I would subscribe to) I believe this is an early
| indication of something that may well develop into an
| actual problem in a relatively short amount of time.
| NickM wrote:
| _When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude
| in a very short time"._
|
| The article actually has quantitative data that shows reports
| of "incidents where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit
| and emergency responders" rising by a couple orders of
| magnitude in a year.
|
| Yeah, the city officials have to cover their asses and make
| disclaimers about what they can and cannot conclude, because
| all they know is that they're getting more _reports_ of
| incidents; they don 't have access to Waymo's data. But given
| that we know driverless car activity has increased
| substantially, it seems silly to assume that it _must_ just be
| a random coincidence that people are now reporting
| correspondingly more problems.
| gruez wrote:
| >"incidents where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit
| and emergency responders" rising by a couple orders of
| magnitude in a year.
|
| Right, but how much is that in absolute terms? If last year
| you had 0 incidents, and this year you had 1, that's an
| infinity% increase.
| NickM wrote:
| If you actually look at the article, it has the numbers in
| absolute terms. In April '22 (the earliest month on the
| chart) there were 3 reports. Following that, we have
| something that looks like an exponential curve leading to a
| year later where it's nearly 100 per month.
|
| We can split hairs all day about what constitutes an order
| of magnitude or what percentage increases mean or whatever,
| but this doesn't appear to just be statistical noise.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's a chart at this link:
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/driverless-taxi-
| cruis... that shows incidents going from 3 to 91 during
| April '22 to April '23.
| dekhn wrote:
| I dojn't think that chart represents anything informative.
| It's at least partly based on "social media reports" and they
| say it's "incomplete". Any number of alternative explanations
| for that chart (which isn't a "skyrocket") explain the
| results better, such as increased awareness of the cars,
| increased numbers of miles driven (so the complaint rate per
| mile is roughly constant), and negative press coverage of
| incidents.
| NickM wrote:
| _so the complaint rate per mile is roughly constant_
|
| Sure, if the complaint rate per mile is constant, but the
| number of driverless cars increases exponentially, then
| yeah we might expect the number of complaints to increase
| exponentially. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.
|
| _they say it 's "incomplete"_
|
| Okay, so maybe there are more problems than are represented
| in the chart, but that doesn't seem to paint any prettier
| of a picture here.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| By that definition, it is expected to skyrocket. That's
| like saying people who trip and fall while browsing
| instsagram shorts is skyrocketing.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The city assigned a guy to go around and document every time
| an AV does something. That's why the "skyrocketing". They
| didn't count them before and now they do.
|
| If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting _all driver
| stupidity_ it would a significantly different report.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _The city assigned a guy to go around and document every
| time an AV does something_
|
| Want to provide a citation to back that up?
|
| > _They didn 't count them before and now they do._
|
| They've apparently been counting since spring of 2022; the
| large increase in incidents started a year later.
|
| > _If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all
| driver stupidity it would a significantly different
| report._
|
| Lovely dose of whataboutism. We know that drivers do stupid
| things and more or less what the consequences are. It's
| incredibly useful -- and critical -- to find out what AVs
| do that are stupid, and in what ways those stupid things
| differ from what human drivers do. The example of the AV
| driving through yellow caution tape, hooking a Muni wire,
| and then continuing to drive another block before stopping
| is illustrative. We can maybe imagine an unlikely-but-
| possible scenario where a human driver might do the same
| thing, but that would be an outlier.
|
| That also raises another point: as an example, we know that
| some drivers text while driving. Not all drivers do this;
| hopefully it's a minority. But a bad behavior that one AV
| does, _all_ of them (running the same software) will do.
| That 's a much worse problem than bad behaviors that a
| minority of drivers exhibit. (On the other hand, though, if
| fixing it in an AV is straightforward, you eliminate the
| problem... that sort of thing doesn't work with human
| drivers.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| > The example of the AV driving through yellow caution
| tape, hooking a Muni wire, and then continuing to drive
| another block before stopping is illustrative. We can
| maybe imagine an unlikely-but-possible scenario where a
| human driver might do the same thing, but that would be
| an outlier.
|
| Are you joking? Do you live in SF? People are constantly
| driving into subway tunnels.
|
| https://www.ktvu.com/news/cars-drive-in-munis-sunset-
| tunnel-...
| LegitShady wrote:
| "The city actually collected data instead of trusting what
| it was being told"
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > they don't have access to Waymo's data.
|
| That seems odd. Surely the authority that licenses this sort
| of activity should have access to all the data that allows
| proper evaluation of its safety?
|
| Access to such data should be a prerequisite for the
| agreement.
| NickM wrote:
| You would think that, but the quotes in the article from
| the relevant officials seem to imply otherwise.
| comfypotato wrote:
| It's such a new area legally that there aren't precedents
| for this. Consider dietary supplements as an example of a
| product that doesn't have to provide their own safety data.
| throwaway9274 wrote:
| Absolutely right. To situate in terms of recent events, there
| have been three stages of trying to delay / influence the
| California CPUC robotaxi expansion approval vote:
|
| 1. Tried a politician scare campaign. Failed because it was too
| transparent it was an attempted distraction from their terrible
| public safety record.
|
| 2. Tried coning and disabling the vehicles. Failed because it
| was too transparently astroturfed, legal liability.
|
| 3. Now attempting leaks of cherry-picked vanity metrics so
| massaged they can't fairly be called "statistics" to friendly
| anti-tech local media.
|
| Will fail because national and international media no longer
| trust our local journalists, and will investigate
| independently.
|
| The cars work. The incident data meets the standards set forth
| by the state of California.
|
| Local politicians need to find another anti-tech boogeyman.
| This one is too vital to the revitalization of SF.
|
| I am not talking my book, have zero stake here.
|
| It's just saddening to watch a nascent technology finally start
| working well and then get kneecapped by political games.
| 8note wrote:
| > This one is too vital to the revitalization of SF.
|
| Is it? Won't it mean needing to make the city even more car
| oriented than building out better alternatives than car use?
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Since you aren't someone who lives locally to this or is
| affected by this, why do you think it's "too vital to the
| revitalization of SF."
| twelve40 wrote:
| sorry, confused
|
| > their terrible public safety record
|
| whose public safety record? the politicians'? or, who would
| even be materially interested to lobby against robocars and
| Google? honest q.
| Loughla wrote:
| My take is that this isn't so much about privately owned cars
| and/or taxis, but the real politics is in over the road
| trucking, and these incremental steps are just part of that.
|
| If self driving over the road trucking happens (and that's
| sort of inevitable), politicians seem to legitimately believe
| it will collapse our economy. It seems like all self-driving
| anything gets lumped in with that.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Considering that the most popular job in the USA is "truck
| driver", they might have some clue about what the damage
| might be. Eventually they can retrain, but we are going to
| be throwing a whole generation out of work without a very
| good alternative.
| foota wrote:
| I don't think this is accurate, see:
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck-driver-isnt-
| the-m...
| arebop wrote:
| I suspect this is why the road trucking divisions have been
| deprioritized at companies such as Waymo. The truck-drivers
| are better organized than the cabbies+ridesharing drivers,
| so even if highway driving is technically easier it is
| politically less feasible. I suppose it could just be that
| intrastate trucking is too small of an opportunity and
| interstate trucking obviously requires lobbying in multiple
| contiguous states.
| [deleted]
| cashsterling wrote:
| I don't know why the other reply to this post got downvoted
| to hell. THe person has a point.
|
| Fully autonomous cars are cool... don't get me wrong. But
| electric cars and autonomous electric/gas cars are probably
| not the right solution to our person transport needs. using
| energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle to transport one or two 200
| lb humans is not energy-efficient... most of the energy is
| spent just moving the vehicle.
|
| A 60lb e-bike can also transport a 200 lb person whilst using
| far less resources (both to make the vehicle and to operate
| it) and space.
|
| Public transport also has better resource metrics than person
| car-based transport.
|
| But here we are...
| renewiltord wrote:
| We have rental ebikes in San Francisco. I commute daily by
| them.
|
| My friend has some good footage he'll post today to show
| you what it's like. The best drivers to share the road with
| on an e-bike are AVs. They are polite, allow for bike lane
| to sharrow merges, give room, etc.
| Retric wrote:
| It doesn't actually take that much energy to move a 4000 lb
| vehicle. 15,000 miles per year * 1 kWh / 4 miles ~= 10.3
| kWh per day ~= 430 watts 24/7. Few loads are 24/7 but a
| single crypto mining PC can easily use several times that.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I got 15,000 miles * 1.344 kWh/mile = 20,160 kWh or 55
| kWh / day
| coryrc wrote:
| Most EVs are 0.2-0.4 kWh/mi.
| Retric wrote:
| Several ~4k lb EV's get ~400 mile of range on a 100 kWh
| battery pack that's 0.25 kWh/mile or 1 kWh / 4 miles.
|
| The some EV's like the Hummer EV are much worse, but that
| is also ~9,000 pounds fully loaded.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > A 60lb e-bike can also transport a 200 lb person whilst
| using far less resources (both to make the vehicle and to
| operate it) and space.
|
| E-bikes are great for the situations, climates, and people
| who can use them.
|
| E-bikes are not a substitute for the majority of people's
| transportation needs.
|
| I think the young, healthy people who live in moderate
| climates with good weather, short commutes, and little need
| to haul anything often forget that they're own
| transportation needs don't match the average person's.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > and little need to haul anything often forget
|
| The dutch created the cargo bike for this very reason.
| But they have the climate and biking infrastructure to
| support that kind of lifestyle. We (Americans) don't, I
| wish we did.
| tjohns wrote:
| Cargo bikes are great, but when I think of "hauling
| things" I think of items much larger than would ever fit
| there.
|
| You're not going to haul lumber or sheet metal in a cargo
| bike, and that's the easy case.
| 8note wrote:
| The climate isn't a big deal, finland has the climate for
| biking too, it's mostly about having the infrastructure
| and maintaining it.
|
| If cold was a problem, cars wouldn't work either because
| they'd be unable to handle snow. However, we maintain our
| car infrastructure and plow the roads
| sitkack wrote:
| And that is a new thing, they paved the canals are going
| down the route America did and reversed it.
|
| America got conned into a car, suburbia, new construction
| scam that benefited a small number of rich people.
|
| A bike lane is a street you don't let cars drive on.
| nerdbert wrote:
| They work for the majority of people of all ages who live
| in cities where the infrastructure has been properly
| built to accommodate bikes.
|
| Most people rarely need to haul anything and can use
| carshare when they do.
|
| I've demoed a multistory house down to the bricks and re-
| built it from the outside in without a car.
|
| Hired someone to haul off a dumpster several times.
|
| For major materials deliveries, like beams or windows,
| usually it was the better part of a flatbed truck anyway,
| so I wasn't going to be doing that in a car. Most of the
| rest I did with a cargo bike. I only two or three times
| even bothered to use carshare (e.g. for a load of tiles)
| even though it's cheap.
|
| I'm not at all proposing that professional builders work
| this way, but also a relatively small proportion of the
| population are professional builders. And doing it this
| way wasn't any kind of a drag for me.
| kiba wrote:
| Cargo bikes are a thing. It's also why we have ebike so
| we don't have to be hyper fit.
|
| The need to haul weekly grocery is greatly reduced with
| proper urban planning like corner stores and walkable
| streets.
|
| Bad weather can be mitigated through proper clothing. In
| Finland, people ride their bikes through the winter.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| No, we want to change the long commute situation and
| change the way roads and cars are so that bikes are not a
| terrifying option.
| meowkit wrote:
| You're comparing the merits of apples to oranges and not
| thinking about whether the soil or terrain is suitable for
| an apple tree or an orange tree.
|
| We should have public transit improvements across the
| board, and we should have ebikes/more bikelanes and more
| mixed used land.
|
| The reality is that there is too much red tape/bureaucracy,
| too much nimbyism, and not enough political firepower to
| build out that infrastructure.
|
| The majority of the US is car dependent, and we are stuck
| in that local optima. Self driving cars will ease the
| burden by making it realistic to not own a car (you just
| rideshare for cheap). Less car owners means there will be
| more demand for better public transportation
| infrastructure.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Cool, you have an affordable, tenuously waterproofed,
| chinese mass produced e-bike, it's your only available mode
| of transportation, you need to go into the office for a
| meeting, and it's raining.
|
| Welcome to hell.
|
| Also, not sure if you've used public transportation
| recently, but man, it SUCKS. Far less time efficient than a
| car, often crowded during the times you want to use it, and
| ZERO enforcement of proper etiquette or rules or
| regulations as far as riders are concerned.
|
| If you could promise me a pleasant public transportation
| service, clean, no panhandling, no dude blasting music from
| his shitty offbrand bluetooth speaker, not unbearably
| hot/cold, armed security keeping the peace, then sure, I'll
| ride it every day. We both know that is literally never
| going to happen, and public transport will continue to be a
| minimally viable pipe dream that we spend far too much
| money on.
|
| TL;DR; Cars are here to stay, you need to make the cities
| work with them. Yes it's a harder problem to solve, but
| it's the problem you've got.
| nerdbert wrote:
| > Cool, you have an affordable, tenuously waterproofed,
| chinese mass produced e-bike, it's your only available
| mode of transportation, you need to go into the office
| for a meeting, and it's raining. Welcome to hell.
|
| It's raining half the time here in the Netherlands. You
| can stand under a convenient overhang in the banking
| district of Amsterdam at 8am and watch the bankers pour
| into the underground bike parking lots. They use cheap
| and readily available outerwear that covers their clothes
| - including shoes - and keeps them dry. Suits, skirts,
| high heels, whatever.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's not that hard to do. I ride in the rain and fog here
| in SF (the city under discussion), but you need dry
| pants. The real thing is that this is not an AV vs. ebike
| thing. Almost all people who ride bikes/ebikes here are
| pro-AV. It's mostly people not from SF and people who
| don't ride who are anti-AV.
|
| AVs are so much safer and predictable than human drivers.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Something like the West Coast Express train in Vancouver
| is what you want - tables, washrooms, AC plugs for
| charging your stuff, etc. It's a great way to commute.
| coryrc wrote:
| I agree with you on public transportation.
|
| But pre-pandemic I e-biked to the office rain or cloudy
| in Seattle 4 days a week. Albeit Seattle rains aren't
| usually heavy.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Rain jackets.
|
| Outer wear solving this problem has been around for a
| long, long time.
| mlinsey wrote:
| We aren't talking about public spending on self-driving car
| infrastructure vs. bikes and mass-transit infrastructure. I
| would much rather fund the latter with public money.
|
| What we're talking about is erecting regulatory barriers
| for a technology that could solve one very large problem
| (auto safety), just because that technology doesn't solve
| some other problem (climate). This is like saying data
| privacy protections on a social networking site are not the
| right solution, because they don't really solve the
| misinformation problem.
|
| My parents who live out in the burbs can only drive for so
| much longer. I sure hope they aren't as stubborn as my
| grandparent who drove to the age of 90 and got into an
| accident (fortunately with only a parked car), but either
| way I don't think finally learning to ride a bike at the
| age of 70 is the answer either.
|
| We should move forward with rolling self-driving cars as
| quickly as we safely can. Speaking as someone who does not
| own a car and has no desire to ever own a car, I think it
| would benefit me a lot too, by making it less likely for me
| to get run over while I walk or bike around, the fear of
| the latter being the biggest obstacle preventing most
| people I know from biking more too.
| dmix wrote:
| The point of autonomous electric vehicles isn't to
| revolutionize personal transportation. Everyone's not just
| sitting around trying to re-think how we can improve our
| lives as aggressively as possible.
|
| As radical as it is removing a driver in terms of what it
| means for people's economic relationship to cars and for
| business operations it's still an incremental adjustment in
| human behaviour...for regular people. That's how technology
| gets adopted in the real world.
|
| You don't need to think hard and long about why ebikes are
| still going to be limited to downtown-living urbanites and
| recreational casual riders [1]. Basically in an ideal world
| it will _significantly_ expanding the existing niche biking
| population in American cities, taking existing riders
| further /long (ramping up average usage) and introducing
| tons of new riders to the streets. But still not enough to
| significantly take cars off roads in a macro-context,
| especially considering how many people live in suburbs or
| city neighbourhoods which are glorified suburbs.
|
| [1] I'm just trying to imagine 95% of my family members
| even getting on an e-bike for recreation let alone as a
| serious alternative to using a car.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| My city doesn't even have sidewalks. Bikes aren't
| happening.
| llambda wrote:
| While I understand your point is likely that sidewalks
| would come before later advancements (like support for
| bikes) I want to make it clear that bikes do not belong
| on sidewalks.
|
| If you ride a bike please ride it in the street with
| other vehicles. This is the law in some jurisdictions
| (such as where I live) but frequently ignored.
|
| Failure to do this poses a serious risk to pedestrians.
| Please do not use sidewalks as an alternative road.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Some sidewalks are designed for bikes, especially in
| Europe. If you are on one of those, pedestrians beware
| (especially in Netherlands and Germany).
|
| I prefer bike lanes on roads or bike trails. Driving on
| roads with traffic for a small amount of time: OK, but
| all the time: hard no.
| dekhn wrote:
| I've stopped advising people to not ride bikes on
| sidewalks, especially opposite the direction of traffic,
| even in situations where it's legally permitted (for
| example, kids in my area are allowed to ride on
| sidewalks).
|
| People get really worked up when you ask them to stop,
| really angry! Which I find so odd because if somebody
| comes up to me and says something is both illegal _and_
| unsafe, I check the laws, and put some critical thought
| into what the risks could be, and then typically comply
| if I 'm convinced, or simply respond with "I have heard
| what you are asking, but it's not absolutely required, so
| I will continue to do so."
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| E-bikes are a non-started due to theft problems. If you
| think coning of a robo-taxi is bad, have a few prowlers
| coming by every hour looking for a bike to poach, it is
| much worse for the e-bike crowd.
|
| If you are going with taxis/ubers/personal transit anyways,
| I think autonomous makes a lot of sense. They basically
| allow you to optimize your road bandwidth if taken to an
| extreme level (which I'm sure more authoritarian countries
| with huge traffic problems will jump on). But you are
| right: the better answer is mass transit, for optimizing
| roadway bandwidth (and energy resources).
|
| I for one look forward to a day where I can have my car
| drive us from Seattle to Yellowstone. I know I probably
| should have flown and rented a car onsite, it is really
| whimsical, but I want to try that at least once.
| II2II wrote:
| The numbers they gave is more than a doubling, while they were
| quite clear about the limitations of their data. That includes
| not knowing how many AVs are on the road, which is something
| that the companies should be able to provide.
|
| Also look at the claims that AVs have not caused death or
| serious injury. (I noticed that they did not claim that AVs
| have not caused injury.) That is great, except I would not
| expect any given corporate vehicle fleet, autonomous or human
| controlled, to have a record of causing death or serious injury
| over a short period of time. The sample size is just too small.
|
| Either way, there's not enough data to prove anything. On the
| other hand, we have a group with a clear conflict of interest
| (the makers of AVs) up against a group which has noted
| concerning incidents but has not been provided with the data
| they need even when it should be available. Then we have a
| third group who are being asked to let an experiment on the
| general public proceed. I doubt that it would pass many
| academic ethics committees, but if you have money, well, go
| ahead!
| sroussey wrote:
| In February they hit 1,000,000 miles cumulative for all
| previous years. Last week they hit 3,000,000 miles.
|
| Cars kill about as many Americans as the Vietnam War, but
| every year. Aside from guns, I can't think of anything else
| so deadly that we give to our children as they enter
| adulthood.
|
| It is common, it is not part of the news cycle. We care more
| about the unlikely terrorist. People are bad with numbers.
|
| Personally, I think it would a huge ethics violation to _not_
| be running tests of autonomous cars (not talking Telsa toy
| driving stuff).
| II2II wrote:
| A cumulative 3,000,000 miles is nothing. The US Bureau of
| Transportation Statistics estimates there are over
| 3,000,000,000,000 miles of vehicle traffic per year.[1] The
| estimated number of fatalities is around 50,000. There is
| no way to assess whether there will be fewer or more
| traffic fatalities with current AV technology given the
| limited amount of data.
|
| As for the unlikely terrorist bit, just in case you weren't
| around when 911 happened: even mathematically inclined
| people were shocked. Not only was it the most lethal attack
| on American soil (nearly 3,000 dead), it was a foreign
| attack. People genuinely didn't know what was going to
| happen and were living in fear for a while. Unfortunately,
| some people still carry those fears to this day. Even
| though the numbers don't back them up, I wouldn't be so
| quick to dismiss their emotions and I certainly wouldn't
| attack them for the all too human mistake of misattributing
| risk.
|
| [1] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Anyone quoting "miles driven" is being disingenuous. How
| many of those miles were in the Bay Area plus Arizona?
| pushedx wrote:
| How does the location have anything to do with the total
| number of miles driven?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Because the weather is so much more favorable in those
| two areas. States with extreme weather, especially snow &
| ice, are vastly more challenging.
|
| It's like saying you tested your multi-platform app for
| 10,000 hours, but 9,800 of those hours were on Windows.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Anyone seen the rushing dash cam videos where pedestrians are
| throwing themselves at cars in order to get legal liability
| payouts. Not that I'm accusing all of the reports here of
| being something like that, but I wonder if robotaxis are
| going to result in something like that and actually make the
| entire driving world a lot less ethical.
|
| Then again it'll all be on camera so maybe not
| II2II wrote:
| You will always have opportunists. This article is not
| about that. The specific incident described by the article
| is about a car going through caution tape and getting
| caught up in a fallen overhead powerline. There's very
| little chance of payouts there, though there probably
| should be if considerable damage was caused. When it comes
| to interference with emergency responders, I also doubt it
| being a case of people looking for payouts.
|
| A lot of AV enthusiasts seem to be painting the world as
| against them, when the reality is that people don't like
| being unwilling experimental subjects. If there was proof
| that AVs were safe, I could imagine people jumping on them
| in droves. Why would one reject having a vehicle where you
| have the option to drive yourself or have the driving being
| done for you? (I realize this article isn't about that
| scenario.) On the other hand, the tech industry's mantra of
| moving fast and breaking things - something that existed in
| practice long before the likes of Facebook - has bred an
| incredible amount of distrust. That distrust has only grown
| as it has shifted from the technology itself into grand
| social experiments.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The bulk of those are from Russia.
| yafbum wrote:
| I think it's absolutely critical that public officials report
| what they see: a dramatic increase in reported incidents. Maybe
| - probably imo - this is "just" due to an increase in miles
| driven, but without access to data to support it, public
| officials can't draw conclusions and they should talk about it.
| The public cannot simply entrust safety to commercial taxi
| operators i.e. take Waymo's word for it (or the taxicab mafia's
| word, for that matter).
| ipaddr wrote:
| 3 to 91 a year later is skyrocketing.
| Zetice wrote:
| Am I reading the graph wrong? a 3x increase over one month that
| sustains into the next month qualifies as "skyrocketing" to
| me...
| dekhn wrote:
| I've commented elsewhere I don't think the chart is
| informative (and listed several good reasons why). But all
| you're describing is a 300% increase, not several orders of
| magnitude increase.
|
| If you look at Google's QPS chart (maintained in crayon by
| the original engineers!) you will see that they frequently
| had to rescale the chart by factors of ten because their
| growth rate in the early days was exponential.
|
| The chart is not an example of exponential growth.
| kelnos wrote:
| "Skyrocketing" is not a well-defined term. Nowhere is
| exponential growth required to qualify. A 300% increase in
| a month on this sort of metric would absolutely qualify as
| skyrocketing to me.
| Zetice wrote:
| Exponential growth, several orders of magnitude... these
| are not what "skyrocketing" means, in actuality. So you are
| correct, none of those phrases describe the graph here, but
| none of those phrases matter.
|
| It's a sudden, alarming, and seemingly sustained trend, and
| it's worth writing an article over.
| dekhn wrote:
| Have you ever looked at the chart of the velocity of a
| rocket? Rockets accelerate from 0 to 17,000 mph in ~5-6
| minutes. the initial phase is exponential.
|
| (it's not useful being pedantic here, I think I've
| captured what people think when they hear the word
| "skyrocket"; it's intentionally used to frame the
| discussion)
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I looked for one, here's what I found: https://www.google
| .com/search?q=rocket+velocity+time+graph
|
| Mostly they look pretty linear.
|
| Solid rockets are pretty much binary in terms of thrust
| (they are either 100% or 0%), so they would accelerate
| fastest at low speeds, and accelerate slower as they
| encounter air resistance, and then begin to accelerate
| faster as they move into thinner air. But the rate of
| acceleration is, to my understanding, going to be highest
| in the first few seconds when air resistance is
| negligible, and about the same when they reach space
| where air resistance is 0. Exponential velocity increases
| mean that the rate of acceleration has to increase, which
| isn't something that is happening with rockets.
|
| A "skyrocket" implies something different than a
| "spacerocket". Anything going 17,000 miles per hour is in
| LEO and no longer in the sky. Using this definition we
| should look at "fox 3" class missiles as they are
| launched from the sky at targets in the sky. Hypersonic
| missiles are actually air-breathing, and not rocket
| powered so they are excluded. Those missiles have an
| acceleration graph that is basically linear, but they
| start out already travelling several hundred miles per
| hour at a minimum, they then accelerate using a solid
| rocket motor (providing roughly equal thrust throughout
| its burn) up to a top speed of Mach 4 or so. After that
| they then use momentum to reach their target, but
| generally only lose speed after the engine cuts off.
|
| So I posit that "skyrocketing" is starting from a fixed
| base, rapid linear increase, followed by a gradual
| decrease.
|
| How's that for pedantic?
| dekhn wrote:
| This is one of the few responses I've seen that is
| actually somewhat convincing :) But you left out the mass
| term in your solid rocket comments.
|
| So what I take from this is when a journalist says
| "skyrocket" it really isn't anything dramatic, it's just
| hohum fireworks (skyrockets are not missles, they are
| something else).
| Zetice wrote:
| Now imagine making a chart that adds a 100x multiplier to
| that rocket's data! Only _that_ chart now can be called
| "skyrocketing" then, because it dwarfs the rocket's
| original data...
|
| The fact that more "skyrocketing" things exist doesn't
| invalidate that the word "skyrocketing" could apply to
| what's presented here, and it does accurately frame the
| discussion around the sudden, alarming trend of self
| driving car incidents over time.
|
| The various causes of the data
| jump/spike/skyrocket/whatever are fairly discussed in the
| article, and based on what's there it seems reasonable to
| conclude that there are much more complicated forces at
| play here other than, "self driving cars bad". The chart
| illustrates the sudden change, but explicitly tries to
| provide a number of very different possible explanations
| for the data.
| projektfu wrote:
| A skyrocket is a firework. Its most salient feature is
| that it flies up above other things and calls attention
| to itself.
| learn-forever wrote:
| Hard to get alarmed without knowing what the rate is. If
| the growth in miles driven is outpacing the growth in
| incidents, it's cause for the opposite of alarm.
| [deleted]
| barbazoo wrote:
| When I hear "skyrocket" in a headline from a source like that I
| immediately assume it's something like "from 2 to 4" or
| something like that.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Your last paragraph perfectly describes what for me was the key
| epiphany of my adult life. When I gained the scientific
| maturity to read papers and I realized how shaky the ground was
| upon which most studies stand, it was pretty enlightening.
| hosh wrote:
| There may not be data to support this, but on the other hand,
| informal perceptions -- even if unsupported by data -- matters
| a great deal with products and systems.
|
| But I would ask the people living there what they perceive, not
| just relying on a news reporter.
| splonk wrote:
| I have no particular data to support this, but anecdotally,
| my biggest issue with Cruise testing a couple years ago was
| that it was excessively cautious - randomly braking for no
| obvious reason, dithering at intersections trying to yield,
| that kind of thing. I could live with that.
|
| Now (literally yesterday) a driverless Cruise car trying to
| make a left turn was yielding to me walking across the
| intersection, and then suddenly decided to go before I'd
| cleared the intersection. Would it have hit me if I hadn't
| scurried out of the way? I don't know, but it didn't inspire
| confidence, and it doesn't take many experiences like this to
| turn public opinion. Cruise in particular seems to have made
| their cars more aggressive in my small personal sample size.
| dekhn wrote:
| informal perceptions are about the last thing you want when
| making decisions about large-scale technology roll-outs.
| Instead, people should be informed with the highest quality
| data, and need to be reminded that informal perceptions are
| often biased and skewed.
| yafbum wrote:
| At the end of the day, people always make decisions based
| on emotion, because every decision involves assessing risk,
| including the risk of things that were not thought of
| testing. Data only tells you about the past while decisions
| only affect your future.
| dekhn wrote:
| There's a difference between making a decision based on
| emotion, and making a decision based on wisdom and data.
| Frequently, when I have a hard decision to make, I wait a
| while until I'm feeling "less emotional", so that my
| normal knee-jerk reactions don't dominate.
| hosh wrote:
| A study of the formalism called Promise Theory will quickly
| show how that is not true.
|
| Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their
| decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has
| a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception
| of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally
| defined as intentions made known to an audience) will
| always be based upon local, imperfect information.
|
| I can mention other frameworks -- Cynefine, and the error
| where one confuses a Complicated domain (that can still be
| accurately modeled) with a Complex domain (that is
| impossible to accurately model). Or what James C Scott
| discusses an idea called "legibility" and the fallacy in
| imposing legibility on complex systems in his book, _Seeing
| Like a State_.
|
| Perceptions matter. Blaming the participants of a system
| for their being uninformed will not lead to voluntary
| cooperation, much less reliable systems that involve both
| machines and humans.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their
| decision on the imperfect information they have. No one
| has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the
| perception of how well other agents fulfill their
| promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an
| audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect
| information.
|
| There's going to have to be (or there may already be) a
| rule against accusing people of being ChatGPT, but I
| can't believe that this is an argument that the
| "imperfect information" that average people have about
| some condition or event is somehow _more important_ than
| the actuality of the condition or event _precisely
| because of how wrong average people can be?_
|
| Because _voluntary cooperation_? I should only be
| concerned with that if I 'm doing PR work for these
| companies. It's _their_ job to sell safety, the only
| thing I 'm concerned with is when people are lying. Or
| intentionally confusing the public about some fact,
| polling the confused public about what they think the
| facts are, then _reporting the poll_ to further confuse
| the fact _in lieu of simply reporting the data._
| wheatzies wrote:
| I live in SF and have experience taking cruise rides so I can
| provide some (obviously anecdotal) information. Overall I'm a
| big fan of the autonomous vehicles companies but there are
| downsides with their current abilities. Pros: - As mentioned
| in the article, the cars generally follow traffic laws. I see
| a lot of drivers run red lights around my apartment, but at
| this point I'm fairly confident that a Cruise won't
| accidentally run a light and hit me. The article starts with
| a story of a Cruise ignoring dangerous road conditions and
| caution tape, but that behavior could be hopefully be fixed
| by working with SDC companies to standardize how road hazards
| are marked. - They're electric. We've got some serious
| climate issues to deal with and if these companies can give
| people more non-ICE ride options, then I think we should be
| working to normalize them. I feel similarly about the
| electric scooters in the city. - There's no one in them but
| me. I definitely fall in the camp of people that prefer not
| to have to talk to my Uber/Lyft drivers so that's a plus in
| my book. I also like the tagline mentioned in the article
| that the cars never drive drunk, drowsy, or distracted. I
| don't have to worry about who my driver is or what state of
| mind they're in. - Cost. The rides are cheaper than
| equivalent Uber/Lyft rides in my experience. One could argue
| that they're going to make driving for ride-sharing companies
| unviable as a way to make a living, but that's true for most
| new automation in a given industry.
|
| Cons: - I'm a cyclist, and I often make eye contact with
| drivers to ensure they're aware of me. Without a driver,
| there's not a good way to ensure the car knows I'm there.
| That being said, I've personally never had a close call with
| one on my bike. - As mentioned in the article, they can get
| in the way of first responders. I don't think that's
| justifiable and should be something that these companies
| prioritize before expanding their operating hours and range.
| So yeah, a couple anecdotes and thoughts from someone in the
| area. They're not perfect, but I think the upside potential
| is great and the city should be working to accommodate them
| and get human drivers off the roads as much as possible.
| nerdbert wrote:
| > As mentioned in the article, they can get in the way of
| first responders. I don't think that's justifiable and
| should be something that these companies prioritize
|
| However I also don't want them sideswiping a cyclist in a
| rush to get out of the way of an ambulance.
| dekhn wrote:
| Self driving cars need fake eyeballs (just like the cars in
| Cars) that make eye contact.
| kelnos wrote:
| The article includes a month-by-month graph of incident counts,
| broken down by company, that shows the "skyrocketing" behavior
| starting in March of this year.
|
| The article notes that the data is incomplete, but that only
| means that there are _more_ incidents than the graph shows.
|
| And I'd also expect that part of the reason for the increase is
| that there are many more miles driven now by AVs than a year
| ago. But in a way that doesn't matter: an absolute increase in
| incidents is a problem, regardless of how much driving is going
| on.
|
| This is especially the case when we're talking about things
| that human drivers are less likely to do, like driving through
| caution tape and snagging Muni wires. Not sure how often human
| drivers run over fire hoses or drive directly into active fire
| scenes, but I'd expect it's not often when compared with AV
| software that seems to just not know it's supposed to avoid
| those things.
| throwawhey4362 wrote:
| "Self driving cars were born in San Francisco. Companies like
| Cruise and Waymo are creating something that will literally
| save lives. But some San Francisco politicians hate technology
| so much, they're literally willing to make up statistics lying
| to the public to justify banning them. It's a lesson in killing
| the golden goose." - Garry Tan https://youtu.be/rjgUPUKD-Sc
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Yep 200% increase is 'skyrocketing'.
|
| Even if means what 1 became 3.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| It's also language that the mainstream media uses to install as
| much anxiety and terror into as many people as it possibly can.
| These publications want you to be permanently miserable,
| outraged, and most importantly constantly refreshing your
| phone.
| shagmin wrote:
| Stopped at the paywall. But is this likely a case of the number
| of driverless taxis skyrocketing itself, and the number of
| incidents per driverless taxi mile being more or less constant?
| benatkin wrote:
| Incidents of me posting the 1337th prime to Hacker News are
| skyrocketing.
|
| 11027
| cameldrv wrote:
| I've just got to say I'm so impressed with both Waymo and Cruise.
| Last year they did 4.5 million miles put together in California
| with zero fatalities. This is an incredible achievement.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The US rate is 0.57 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The national average rate has a denominator that is bloated
| up with easy freeway miles. Cruise and Waymo never leave SF
| city streets.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| While OPs statement did make me laugh a bit (I've personally
| driven almost a million miles myself and I don't think my
| odds of killing someone were 1 in 4), we do have to realize
| that MOST miles that make up the 100 million mile stats are
| done at highway speeds far away from pedestrians. If I had to
| do 4 million miles in SF, I just might have hit someone by
| now.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Regardless of whatever the current fatal accident statistics
| are in the U.S., being able to build a robot that drives that
| far in traffic without killing anyone is an incredible
| technical accomplishment. The progress over the past ten
| years is simply astounding.
| dekhn wrote:
| Americans drove 3.2 trillion miles in 2021 and 42,795 people
| died in traffic fatalities (both values are estimates, and
| likely do not include every single mile driven or fatality
| that occurred, depending on how you prefer to count).
|
| So humans drive average of 74 million miles before a person
| gets killed, and Waymo's driven somewhere above 20M miles but
| probably fewer than 74M. At this point, I'd expect no self-
| driving car traffic fatalities, statistically, if the SDC
| fleet is an average driver.
|
| In some sense Waymo and Cruise are basically waiting around
| for a fatality (not that they want one) so they start having
| a denominator that isn't zero.
| carapace wrote:
| First, where is the data?
|
| Second, yeah, it's bananas to test large, fast, heavy robots on
| public streets. The only reason we let it happen is because the
| robots look like cars.
|
| Third, it's bananas to have large, fast, heavy vehicles
| _everywhere_ mixed in with all the other traffic. The only reason
| we let it happen is a mass-marketing campaign (see "The Real
| Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM )
|
| Here is a film "a Trip down Market Street" recorded in San
| Francisco on April 14, 1906, just before the Great Earthquake.
| The source of the problem is clear: cars _accelerate_ much faster
| than horses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| They're not very fast at all, unfortunately, at least for the
| riders. And they seem to try to pick the longest, least
| congested paths to get to destination to avoid bumping into too
| many tough turns that might get them in trouble. Takes easily
| 2x as long as with an Uber.
| peterisza wrote:
| I think they are _training_ and not testing. I might be wrong,
| but if I am right, the use of public roads is a necessity. This
| is how AI works, I guess.
| peterisza wrote:
| Anyone care to explain why they downvoted this?
| crote wrote:
| Probably because "training" implies direct and constant
| supervision, which would almost completely avoid any chance
| of incidents because the human is in charge at all times.
|
| Deploying an _unsupervised_ robot on the general public for
| training purposes is even worse than for testing purposes.
| peterisza wrote:
| Why? If it is already safer than human drivers (as they
| claim), training and testing are both okay. Not even just
| okay, but a good thing!
| carapace wrote:
| What I think they should do (what I would do if I were in
| charge at a AI-car co.): There's a whole ersatz city out in
| the desert somewhere the whole purpose of which is to allow
| _in situ_ modelling of new "smart" hardware. (This is a real
| thing, but I forgot what it's called and I'm too lazy to look
| it up, I apologize for my barbarism.) The people that "live"
| there are actually paid employees. _That 's where you test
| your self-driving cars._
|
| Further, I would have started by making self-driving golf
| carts made out of nerf that can't go faster than, say, two
| miles per hour, and then iterated. It's reckless to
| immediately attempt to make Knight Industries Two Thousand,
| in my opinion. The potential for mayhem and death goes up
| with the kinetic energy, eh? Both speed and mass contribute
| to the "killer robot" aspect of these machines. Start small
| and light.
|
| Also, let's call them "auto-autos", eh?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, all L4 AV companies have done years of
| closed course testing. You can (not) see these vehicles
| being tested in places like GoMentum station in Concord,
| Altamont Raceway in Livermore, and TRC in Merced, not to
| mention other courses in Vegas, Seattle, Tahoe, AZ,
| Florida, Michigan, and China.
|
| Of course, companies also started with small, slow vehicles
| like the Waymo firefly and the Nuro R vehicles. Voyage
| (acquired by Cruise) was doing their testing in a low speed
| access controlled retirement community, with essentially
| golf carts.
| wholien wrote:
| they are only allowed to run from 9pm to 5/6am though. Rode a
| few and they seemed perfectly safe.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| I regularly (like daily) see empty cars (Waymo & Cruise)
| driving around residential areas by Lake Merced while I'm
| driving to pick up/drop off my kid from summer school...
| that's between the hours 8am and noon. Also see them in the
| Ingleside neighborhoods during the day: they have been
| completely empty when I've seen them. So maybe they can't
| carry passengers other than those other times, but they are
| definitely driving around outside of the hours you cite.
|
| Having said that, I've not seen any bad driving from them.
| There are certainly far worse human drivers, motorcyclists,
| bicyclists, and pedestrians out there on a regular basis, so
| I'm not against the self-driving cars being on the street.
| wholien wrote:
| oh true. I didnt think about the non-occupied times when
| they run
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah, I think they don't carry passengers outside of those
| nighttime hours, but they are still testing them in some
| areas during the day (which makes sense, need to test them
| then if they eventually want to operate then)
| clsec wrote:
| You are absolutely correct.
| wordsarelies wrote:
| So it's funny, when they first started rolling these out folks
| were interested, intrigued even. Folks walking would give them
| deference, mostly not run in front of them if they saw them, very
| unlike how they treat regular drivers. But now folks are getting
| sick of them.
|
| So they were modeling all their behavior and driving around
| cooperative pedestrians and cars (mostly) now they have to model
| for an adversarial public.
|
| Good fucking luck.
| valine wrote:
| Would be easier to change the paint job. Just disguise them as
| regular taxis.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| They are MUCH more aggressive now. It used to be that if you
| saw one, you could be 99% sure it would stop and wait for the
| path to be _fully_ clear. Now, they will buzz right by you
| within a foot or two. Very alarming how quickly they progressed
| to being careless.
| JoshTko wrote:
| Google will optimize minimizing deaths/accidents vs
| maximizing trips/revenue. So it seems that buzzing closer to
| people is optimal for Google.
| what-no-tests wrote:
| That's the "AI Alignment" problem we've heard so much about
| recently.
| __loam wrote:
| Do you have anything beyond anecdotal evidence to support
| this?
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| I miss Uber pool. It was $5 for a ride across town and it was a
| great way to meet people. Why do we need this self driving Taxi
| shit? Would much prefer my own car to have that functionality
| than to rent it out on a per-ride basis
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| What seems odd to me is that hardly anyone in SF seems to want
| them there (citizens, officials) yet it keeps getting pushed
| through?
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| I'm not sure how one would go about substantiating that "nobody
| wants them there". It's hard to get the pulse of it outside of
| the media bubble which tends to be tech-negative.
| pound wrote:
| I'm in SF and I welcome them. Human drivers are much worse.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| I'm so excited for them to come to Seattle!
|
| There are many people that want them! There are even more than
| want 90% cheaper Ubers.
| addisonl wrote:
| Wouldn't get your hopes up on it being 90% cheaper--typically
| Waymo cost the same or slightly more than Uber for me.
| Obviously the economics change as time goes on but I doubt
| they will make it that much cheaper.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| > but I doubt they will make it that much cheaper.
|
| All other tech has gotten 10x cheaper across 10 years. No
| reason to doubt robotaxi fleets won't as well.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Everyone I know in SF is excited it's really only the officials
| and some news stories. The wait list to join the App is crazy
| long demand outpaces the number of cars they have on the road.
| You're just seeing a very skewed narrative.
| omgmajk wrote:
| I'm not in SF, or even inte US - but the view I get from the
| internet reading stories, posts and comments is that only
| people in the NIMBY community really gets to voice their
| opinions in SF.
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm in SF and want them, my friends want them - we aren't
| represented by the local media or reactionary politics.
|
| Same with doordash as an earlier example, endless articles
| about how terrible doordash and Uber are while a large
| percentage of people in SF use it.
| [deleted]
| cwp wrote:
| San Francisco won't be satisfied until they've completely driven
| out all the tech companies and their employees.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Maybe. I'm not sure that's a bad goal for the average SF
| resident.
| __loam wrote:
| The average SF resident probably works for a tech company
| considering how many natives have been driven out by high
| housing costs. Tech companies are an enormous source of tax
| revenue for the city and many public services quite literally
| depend on that revenue. One of the major issues in the city
| now is the city government's obstinate refusal to approve
| more housing development. The idea that tech workers are
| gentrifying one of the most expensive cities in the world is
| frankly absurd.
| fragmede wrote:
| * * *
| collegeburner wrote:
| okay now let's look at "per capita" stats. how many more cars are
| running? the fact that sf chronicle is even running this without
| actual info is kinda silly. maybe they're not safe but hard to
| assess without knowing that.
| codampa01314 wrote:
| > In San Francisco, those problems can mean self-driving cars
| blocking traffic, transit and emergency responders, as well as
| erratic behavior resulting in close calls with cyclists,
| pedestrians or other vehicles.
|
| I have mixed feelings about how to test self-driving vehicles
| (mostly stemming from ignorance). But at some point don't you
| have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or
| else we are resigned to not making progress on this (or very very
| slow progress)? And considering that "no one was hurt" and
| "driverless taxis have never killed or seriously injured anyone
| in the millions of miles they've traveled" are were now there?
| slashdev wrote:
| Uber's driverless vehicle killed someone jaywalking at night in
| another state. So you can't say they've never killed anyone.
| Plus Teslas have killed their own occupants plenty of times.
| bshipp wrote:
| I'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason.
| If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and
| accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated.
|
| The two decades during which human oversight of automated
| systems will be mandatory would be long enough for me to
| finish off my career getting paid to drive while I sit in a
| cab writing code, periodically checking over the status of my
| lead truck and the two or three slaved trucks following me.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I 'm debating about renewing my truck license for this
| reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be
| approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is
| automated._
|
| Trucks and cars are different. They've been running
| automated big rigs between Dallas, Houston, San Antonio,
| and El Paso for a few years now.
| slashdev wrote:
| I think there will be a strong demand for truck drivers
| long after most people would expect.
|
| We're far from self driving vehicles still, and trucks will
| be the last to be automated, and once they are, I expect
| they'll require human supervision just like you predict.
| de_keyboard wrote:
| Not disagreeing, but you might find it interesting to learn
| about the history of the term "jaywalking"
| ketralnis wrote:
| > at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the
| wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not
| making progress on this
|
| It's not my problem whether Waymo makes progress on their
| technology, but they make it my problem when they hit me with
| their car.
|
| I do have sympathy for wanting to make the progress: we might
| make better pacemakers faster by testing out 20 designs on 20
| people. But nobody wants to be the one that gets the one that
| doesn't work. And in this case the victims aren't even
| involved. They didn't opt-in to beta testing the road full of
| half-baked robots, they're just trying to get to work.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| In the interest of having a discussion, let's assume that AVs
| are a meaningful goal to work towards for whatever reason.
| But given that, how do we get vehicles from the drawing board
| to actually being viable products without on-road testing?
| I've never seen a complex product that went from non-existent
| to perfect in the first deployment, so it doesn't seem
| realistic to expect that here.
|
| Instead, they should be developed iteratively, with design
| prototypes that proceed from closed-course testing to
| supervised public testing to closed course autonomous
| testing, to on-road autonomy over the course of many years.
| This is what Waymo did. There's a reasonable argument to be
| made that they did this too quickly, but I can't reconcile
| that with your argument that they shouldn't have done it _at
| all_.
|
| In an ideal world, there'd also be effective government
| oversight and public safety monitoring at every stage of the
| above process. Regulators haven't stepped up to do this,
| though AV companies have done quite a bit to stymie the
| oversight process as well.
| ketralnis wrote:
| Sadly, I come only with problems and not solutions. I take
| it as axiomatic that beta-testing with peoples' lives that
| didn't agree to do so is unacceptable. That closes off a
| lot of the solution space that you're proposing. That sucks
| and you're free to disagree but again I take it ethically
| unassailable.
|
| Teleportation would also be a societal game changer but if
| the only way there is to beta test it on unwilling
| participants I'd also believe that, well, we just don't get
| teleportation then.
|
| It's up to Waymo to figure out how to get there, not to me.
| I do _not_ take it as axiomatic that just because it 'd be
| useful that the ends justify the means. And it certainly
| isn't up to Waymo whether you or I can be sacrificed.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Should student drivers not be allowed on the roads either?
| ketralnis wrote:
| I don't take these to be analogous. Even the worst human
| driver can recognise that they don't recognise a situation.
| imadj wrote:
| My stance have shifted a bit lately, from "concerns/what ifs" to
| "let's see", I began to look at it through "the sooner the
| better" lenses.
|
| Advancements like these are inevitable and have been on the radar
| for a long time. The more people familiar and informed about the
| tech, the better they are equipped in order to put the right
| regulations.
| jconley wrote:
| @garry did a rebuttal video to this.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc
| jeffbee wrote:
| Kind of cringe when he says "Municipal Transportation
| _Association_ ". Comes off like a guy who has probably never
| boarded a bus.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - none of this reporting can be trusted from the
| chronicle, the SF politics are crazy and there's a lot of
| bullshit/bad-faith.
|
| I hope cruise overcomes this and the people putting traffic
| comes and such on the cars are stopped.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _none of this reporting can be trusted from the chronicle_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
| whatgoodisaroad wrote:
| This isn't an example of shooting the messenger because you
| dislike the message. The SF Chronicle just has a track
| record of anti SF bias, then turning around and complaining
| about the effects of their own reporting
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/sf-downtown-
| doom-l...
|
| It's sadly not a trustworthy source on these matters
| lucisferre wrote:
| While I was skeptical about this video and the tone it opens up
| with did nothing to help with that, it is actually worth a
| watch.
| solardev wrote:
| What's the summary?
| gruez wrote:
| https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-.
| ..
| solardev wrote:
| Oooh, this is awesome. Thanks! I'll have to use that more
| often.
|
| I miss the days when people published their thoughts in
| writing... so many videos are just minutes/hours of wasted
| time.
| what-no-tests wrote:
| I worked as a software engineering tech lead on the "Ground
| Truth" team at GM Cruise for a short period in 2018.
|
| During orientation, the founder (Kyle Vogt) told us all that the
| cars don't need to be better than a human driver, they only need
| to be "not worse" than a human driver. In fact, when questioned
| about it, he said that the sooner we could get robot cars on the
| streets of SF the sooner the software could improve.
|
| The idea was that the more dangerous, "not worse than a human"
| era would be a necessary sacrifice of safety (compared to waiting
| forever until we had 100% perfect driving robot cars) -- so we
| could fast-forward to major improvements in the robot cars'
| capabilities.
|
| That (IMO) cavalier attitude, a lack of rigor in the way software
| for the vehicles was being developed, and the fact that we had
| constant meetings about "diversity and inclusion" rather than on
| robustness, safety, ethics and quality pushed me to resign
| abruptly and go my own way.
|
| Very disappointing experience - as I had hoped to see "The
| Future" before joining GM Cruise and even a fat paycheck and RSUs
| weren't enough to sooth my scruples.
| x86x87 wrote:
| The classic "some of you might dir but that's a risk I'm
| willong to take?"
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It would be more useful to have some actual statistics comparing
| this to human drivers instead of scare pieces. Because accidents
| did happen before.
| adamkf wrote:
| In my experience living in SF, these cars are much safer than the
| typical drivers in my neighborhood for pedestrians. Most human
| drivers around here don't even bother to stop at stop signs, and
| instead just slow slightly. With the cruise and Waymo cars, I
| feel like the risk is a bit lower when I'm on my bike or walking.
|
| I have witnessed a Cruise car stopping in the middle of the road
| when faced with an oncoming emergency vehicle, so I totally buy
| that they aren't ready for prime time yet.
|
| Honestly, I'd prefer if we prioritized enforcing existing traffic
| laws for regular vehicles.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Everyone's complaining that the number of total incidents is
| still small, but the change in those mirrors my own experience
| driving near those cars, which does _not_ show up in the small
| number of worst incidents. Meaning the small, but rapidly growing
| data in the article reflects just the tip of the iceberg.
|
| About the time that the graph shows incidents blowing up, the
| cruise at least went from a cool thing to drive near to a very
| unpredictable thing that would act up every time I was near one
| (which was daily). For each of those ~100/mo reported incidents,
| there's surely a ton more going unreported, and even more
| non-'incident' nuisances. Which seem to be skyrocketing as well.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their
| safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say,
| have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit.
|
| This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean
| human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small
| minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents,
| thereby severely inflating the mean human incident rate.
|
| Today's self-driving cars may be safer than the _mean_ human
| driver, but I would wager they are far from the _median_ human
| driver, and absolutely nowhere close to the top 10% of human
| drivers. It may be possible (but very difficult) to beat the
| median human with dramatic improvements to current self-driving
| algorithms, but beating the top 10% of human drivers will require
| AGI.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think a key disconnect is that the 'incidents' being
| complained of most are not collisions, but they can still be
| disruptive, and indeed dangerous.
|
| Suppose one were to just install brightly painted immobile
| bollards on streets, and insist they were "driving" just very
| very slowly. They wouldn't hit anyone. They wouldn't kill
| anyone. They would piss everyone off.
|
| This disconnect is repeatedly part of where this conversation
| gets tripped up.
|
| > "Cruise's safety record is publicly reported and includes
| having driven millions of miles in an extremely complex urban
| environment with zero life-threatening injuries or fatalities,"
| Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow told The Chronicle.
|
| > The city's transportation agencies documented several
| incidents where driverless cars disrupted Muni service. During
| the night of Sept. 23, five Cruise cars blocked traffic lanes
| on Mission Street in Bernal Heights, stalling a Muni bus for 45
| minutes. On at least three different occasions, Cruise cars
| stopped on Muni light-rail tracks, halting service.
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/
|
| Ok great, they didn't kill or injure people which is nice, but
| they were _disruptive_ in a way which a human driver would not
| have been. And critically, we can't _have_ a fact-based
| conversation around those non-collision incidents because these
| companies aren't even required to report them:
|
| > But officials said it's been difficult to assess their
| effectiveness because companies aren't required to report
| unplanned stop incidents -- some of which have been captured on
| social media -- when they happen.
|
| > San Francisco officials want the state to require that
| companies report incidents when they happen.
|
| I've certainly seen cases where self-driving cars behaved in a
| way that I would consider reckless if a human was at the wheel,
| but were not collisions, did not result in injury, and I expect
| will not form part of any statistics reported to any government
| body ... but I think that's too low a bar.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I 've certainly seen cases where self-driving cars behaved
| in a way that I would consider reckless if a human was at the
| wheel, but were not collisions, did not result in injury, and
| I expect will not form part of any statistics reported to any
| government body_
|
| A few weeks ago I saw one blow a red light. Nobody hurt or
| killed, so it wasn't reported to any responsible agency. It
| might not have even been tallied by the company, if the car
| thought there wasn't a problem. But its action was clearly
| unsafe.
|
| It's hard to get a grip on the problem when the data is so
| faulty.
| [deleted]
| yonran wrote:
| Someone posted an example of a self-driving Cruise car that
| appeared to run a red light https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfra
| ncisco/comments/14wyyzw/just_.... Although in that example,
| technically the self-driving car was guilty of entering the
| intersection without sufficient space on the other side,
| rather than of crossing the limit line while facing a red
| light.
| bluGill wrote:
| I care about the overall mean though. Do you know what we call
| the bottom 10% drivers? Drivers! So long as overall they are
| better, then get humans off the road, sure the top 10% are
| worse off, but overall I'm better off as I will never have to
| deal with that bottom 10%.
| gruez wrote:
| >This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the
| mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a
| small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of
| incidents, thereby severely inflating the mean human incident
| rate.
|
| Why is this disingenuous? Unless you're also for advocating for
| banning those top 10% of drivers from driving, you can't just
| cherry pick only the good drivers.
| scarmig wrote:
| Mean is the relevant metric, though. If it's only the bottom
| 10% of human drivers who cause all crashes and driverless cars
| are as safe as the 20p human driver, you can replace all human
| drivers with autonomous ones and eliminate all crashes.
|
| That's to say nothing of the fact that driverless cars will
| improve from their current level, and the fact that companies
| operating them can be held liable for crashes and forced to
| account for their actions in a way that the worst human drivers
| cannot (which provides a strong incentive for them to improve).
| cozzyd wrote:
| you can more easily prevent the bottom 10% from driving by
| more rigorous driving standards / more stringent revocation
| of licenses.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| > According to the NHTSA, 19% of motor vehicle fatalities
| involved drivers with invalid licenses. Furthermore,
| drivers with invalid licenses comprise 13% of all drivers
| in fatal crashes.
|
| https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/driving-without-
| licens...
|
| I'm all for more rigorous driving standards. However, the
| USA is car centric and people need jobs.
|
| To really do what you're suggesting, the USA would need to
| regulate car companies to validate driving licenses while
| the car was in use. AND THEN, the USA would need to figure
| out what to do with all of these upset newly unemployed and
| aggressive people.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Yes, car-centricity is a big problem, I agree (as someone
| who doesn't own a car or regularly drive...).
|
| Are robo-cars going to prevent people from driving with
| invalid licenses?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > Are robo-cars going to prevent people from driving with
| invalid licenses
|
| Yes. Because they wouldn't be driving.
| cozzyd wrote:
| unless human-operated vehicles become banned or
| comparatively inordinately expensive, I'm not sure how
| that would happen? At least any time soon...
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Vehicles in general are inordinately expensive.
|
| Lyft just quoted me: $20 for 3.5 miles, in 15mins. That
| is a reasonable daily commute. 2 * $20 = $40 per day
| round trip. $40 * 5 = $200 per week. $200 * 50 = $10,000
| per year.
|
| For a 45 min commute: that is $30k per year.
|
| Clearly should buy a vehicle.
|
| However, with 10x cheaper Lyfts: at 1-3k per year; that
| is the cost of maintenance, registration, and insurance.
| Then the car payments on top of that... Owning a car
| would be inordinately expensive.
|
| This doesn't even include the benefit of getting 45-90
| mins back to learn or play while commuting.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I don't think Lyfts get 10x cheaper with robocars. It's
| not like 90% of your fare goes to driver net profit.
| Maybe a factor of 2, but I'm not even sure that will be
| true (robocars will generally be more expensive, and
| require additional remote monitoring).
|
| https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Parrott-Reich-
| Seattl... suggests that net driver pay is less than half
| of gross pay, which doesn't account for the portion that
| Lyft takes. Taking that at face value, maybe it gets 40%
| cheaper? Driving is expensive!
|
| There are some economies of scale in
| maintenance/procurement (but at the same time, you need
| all-new, likely more expensive vehicles than the mean
| Lyft driver), and for infrequent users who pay for
| parking then that can make a big difference, but unless
| the robocar operator makes no profit, it's hard to
| imagine robocars being significantly cheaper than owning
| a car if you are using it regularly.
| gruez wrote:
| >https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Parrott-Reich-
| Seattl... suggests that net driver pay is less than half
| of gross pay, which doesn't account for the portion that
| Lyft takes. Taking that at face value, maybe it gets 40%
| cheaper? Driving is expensive!
|
| I'm not sure what expenses goes into calculating "net
| driver pay", but based on a quick skim there are some
| questionable items in there. "Exhibit 28 Total Seattle
| TNC driver expenses" lists stuff like "health insurance
| costs" and "independent contractor taxes", which
| obviously wouldn't be needed for robotaxis. If we drill
| down into "vehicle operating costs", there are also some
| questionable items, like $1560/year expense for
| "cellphone". I agree that robotaxis being 90% cheaper is
| unlikely, but 66%-75% cheaper (ie. a quarter to a third
| of the price) seems to be within the realm of
| possibility.
| cozzyd wrote:
| certainly whatever telemetry system is used in robocars
| will be more expensive than "cell phone," but yes would
| save on tax and health insurance.
| notahacker wrote:
| If we had 10x cheaper Lyfts (and that's a big if) then
| they will likely cause more fatalities than humans even
| if somewhat safer, on account of a lot more private
| vehicle urban miles
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's much worse in SF. When the SFPD runs (ran, really,
| because they no longer do traffic ops at all) crosswalk
| stings, the _majority_ of drivers who violate the
| crossing pedestrian 's right of way are unlicensed.
| Losing your license in California has virtually no
| influence on whether you continue to drive.
| macintux wrote:
| After creating a society where car ownership is a necessary
| prerequisite to success, it's challenging to block people
| from participating.
| scarmig wrote:
| About a month ago a human driver ran into me while I was
| riding a bike and sped away (luckily I was unharmed, aside
| from a scrape or two). How exactly would stricter driving
| tests or revocation of licenses have prevented that?
|
| If a Waymo had done that, on the other hand, it'd have
| stopped and I'd be getting a nice big check from Google.
| cozzyd wrote:
| traffic enforcement cameras (e.g. automatic tickets for
| speeding, running red lights, hitting cyclists etc.)
| would probably help, but for some reason motorists are
| against that.
|
| I guess the nice thing about robocars is that they can be
| effectively regulated not to drive at unsafe speeds
| (though probably people would be mad about that too...).
| tiltowait wrote:
| Red light cameras don't seem to increase safety:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-
| cameras...
|
| Motorists hate them because they're a money grab from
| local municipalities.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| That article fails to mention that Houston _also_ has an
| issue with very short yellow timers.
|
| https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/22/2232.asp
|
| Let's cut the bullshit. Red light cameras aren't there to
| increase safety, they're there to increase revenue to the
| city.
| cozzyd wrote:
| even if true, I'm perfectly fine extracting revenue from
| reckless drivers.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Rear end crashes are much more survivable than t-bones
| though, and this study doesn't consider pedestrian
| injuries. To me it sounds like the cameras should also be
| fining people who are stopping too quickly, as it implies
| they were going at an unsafe speed for the condition.
|
| Anyway, relatively few people run red lights. Speed
| cameras would likely have a much higher safety return.
| Thlom wrote:
| Unless you move them around drivers will just slow down
| at the camera and then commence speeding. What works is
| strategically placed cameras that measure average speed
| over a distance. We have these a few places in Norway and
| most people stick to the speed limit or a bit below
| between the cameras.
| taeric wrote:
| Reading your first sentence, I immediately thought "this
| is easy to deal with using checkpointed cameras." And
| then I read the next part. Curious how well that works
| out, all told.
| cozzyd wrote:
| it would also be relatively straightforward to require
| cars to self-report speeding (keep a speed/position log,
| have it be read out at annual inspection). There are some
| issues around tunnels and poor GPS geolocation in urban
| areas, but it would work great for things like
| highways...
| taeric wrote:
| I had that exact thought as I was typing my post! :D
|
| That said, I can see many reasons that is not liked.
| Amusingly, as you add more and more detection systems to
| cars for stuff like this, you are backing into autonomous
| vehicles.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Detecting out of spec driving is a much simpler (and
| cheaper to solve) problem than autonomous driving, and
| may have higher safety benefits? Yes there are privacy
| concerns but the same concerns exist with autonomous
| driving.
| johnfn wrote:
| Hmm, I think that, in fact, _this_ comparison is disingenuous!
| If you want to reduce net collisions, you want to compare to
| the mean, not median. In that case, once you 've produced a
| self-driving car that's better than the mean, you're saving
| lives. You don't need to create a self-driving car which is
| better than every driver, ever.
| scarmig wrote:
| It doesn't even need to be at the mean. It just needs to
| drive more safely than the worst drivers who cause fatal
| crashes, and you're saving lives.
| dublinben wrote:
| SDC will only move the average upwards if they're taking
| less safe drivers off the road. If a 40% safe SDC replaces
| a 50% safe human driver, then you've shifted the average
| downwards.
| valine wrote:
| Why does it require AGI? That's a bold, unsubstantiated claim.
| Let me make my own bold claim: Simple common sense reasoning is
| very close to being solved with our latest LLMs. You would need
| AGI if you wanted to replace the team developing your self-
| driving car. A decent LLM, with vision input that's been fine-
| tuned on driving scenarios, will be more than sufficient for
| Level 5 driving.
| reso wrote:
| You need AGI for good self-driving because driving requires
| predicting the actions of other human drivers at an extremely
| high level. This is second-nature for humans so we barely
| notice that we are doing it, but it is extraordinarily
| difficult for non-humans.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| This is overcome with super human sensing and reaction time
| and better visual angles.
|
| i.e. radar based deceleration to avoid accidents already
| helps many humans avoid collision. It'll help the robot
| too.
|
| The rest of driving is relatively simple, methodological,
| and slow.
| lanstin wrote:
| But also ambiguous and from time to time requiring
| judgment. Should I let that dumb ass driver go next or
| pull around them? I agree it's insane not to allow the
| automated driving use more sensors than humans have. I
| wish I had vision that can cut thru rain and glare.
| reso wrote:
| That is a conjecture which does not represent the current
| state of the technology.
| valine wrote:
| No you don't. I can feed images of crazy driving scenarios
| into LLaVA and get reasonable responses. That's a general
| purpose LLM with $500 worth of fine tuning running locally
| on my PC. You should look into what can be done with the
| current state of the art LLMs. Your intuition for what's
| possible is out of date.
|
| If I can do that with open source LLaMA variants, I can
| only imagine what's possible if you have an actual
| annotated dataset of driving scenarios. Imagine a LLaMA
| model thats been fine tuned for lane selection, AEB, etc.
| lanstin wrote:
| You getting six nines of accuracy on that with good
| latency? Did you watch the "how our large driving model
| deals with stop signs" from Tesla AI department? Given
| the multiplicative effect of driving decisions and the
| weird real world out there, it has be extremely reliable
| and robust to be a good driver as the miles mount up.
| valine wrote:
| The reason you would insert an LLM into the vision stack
| is to deal with the weird and unexpected. Tesla's current
| stop sign approach is to train a classifier from scratch
| on thousands of stop signs images. It's not surprising
| that architecture can't deal with stop signs that fall
| outside the distribution.
|
| LLMs with vision work completely differently. You're
| leveraging the world model, built from a terabyte of text
| data, to aid your classification. The classic example of
| an image they handle well is a man ironing clothes on the
| back of a taxi. Where traditional image classifiers
| wouldn't have a hope of handling that, vision LLMs
| describe it with ease.
|
| https://llava.hliu.cc/
| reso wrote:
| That's a nice conjecture, we will see in the coming years
| if it plays out.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think the reality is somewhere in the middle. You need to
| be able to accurately predict behavior of humans _following
| some conventions_, and to be wary of the behavior of humans
| when they violate those conventions.
|
| An example I saw:
|
| - At the start of a construction area, a guy wearing a hi-
| viz vest holds a stop sign. A self-driving car stops at the
| sign.
|
| - The guy _lowers_ the sign a bit while looking over his
| shoulder down the street towards others on his crew.
|
| At this point a _human_ guesses that the sign is lowered
| only b/c the guy has seen that the car stopped, and expects
| the car to stay stopped until some further signal (e.g. a
| waving gesture, or flipping the sign to show the "slow"
| side). The human driver understands that stop sign guy is
| looking to coordinate with someone else nearby. There's a
| "script" for this kind of interaction.
|
| ... but the self-driving car starts moving as soon as the
| road crew guy lowers the sign. In this case nothing
| seriously bad happened. But it was not following The
| Conventions.
|
| This doesn't take full general intelligence perhaps -- but
| it takes some greater reasoning about what people are doing
| than the cars seem to have currently, and so sometimes they
| drive into a zone that the fire department is actively
| using to fight a fire, and get in the way.
| dekhn wrote:
| I don't think anybody has demonstrated convincingly that a
| self-driving car would specifically need AGI to acheive
| what really matters: statistically better results on a wide
| range of metrics. I don't expect SDCs to solve trolley
| problems (or human drivers to solve them either) or deal
| with truly exceptional situations. To me that's just
| setting up an unnecessarily high bar.
| fossuser wrote:
| While this might be true for the truly general case (though
| I'd bet it's not), when you have a very constrained
| operating area it's a lot less true.
|
| Waymo in Phoenix and current cruise cars in SF seem like
| good counter examples.
|
| The bar is also a lot lower - human drivers are pretty bad.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| I roughly agree. I think the only other piece, that is
| critical to mention, would be remote humans for support in
| extremely awkward situations to help get the car get back on
| track as RLHF.
|
| This requires the car can always come to a safe stop, which I
| think the LLM-based driver should be very capable of doing.
| valine wrote:
| Automatic emergency braking would be a good first step, it
| would certainly solve the case in article where the car
| drives though downed power lines.
|
| I think the logical next step is to have the LLM output the
| driving path similar to how GPT4 outputs SVGs. Feed in
| everything you have, raw images, depth maps, VRU positions,
| nav cues, and ask the LLM output a path.
| prpl wrote:
| P75 would be nice
| speedgoose wrote:
| Thankfully driving safer than the mean or median taxi driver
| seems very achievable.
| paxys wrote:
| They also conveniently ignore everything except collisions. For
| example number of traffic jams caused because your car got
| confused and decided to stop in the middle of the street.
| bhuga wrote:
| I hadn't heard this statistic:
|
| > since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast
| majority of incidents
|
| It's tough to find anything relevant on DDG or google, they
| come up with information about racial disparities in traffic
| stops...can you link anything to read about this?
| efitz wrote:
| I am on my 3rd Tesla- been driving them since 2015- and
| frequently use FSD beta. I've watched autopilot develop into FSD.
|
| The thing that baffles me about all current autonomous vehicle
| efforts is how resistant they are to having any sort of
| environmental feedback engineered specifically to help driverless
| cars.
|
| For instance, in addition to flashing lights, what if fire trucks
| broadcast a "keep away" radio signal? Perhaps engineered
| specifically to be easy to determine distance and direction.
| Perhaps driverless car companies would have to pitch in to pay
| for the transponder refit for every fire truck. This is just an
| idea from a layperson and probably unworkable in this form but
| you should get the drift of my suggestion.
|
| Also, reading this story, why didn't the city place orange cones
| in addition to caution tape? I seriously doubt any driverless car
| company is training their vehicles on caution tape; as a driver
| for 40 years I have never encountered caution tape in a way to
| influence my driving. If the city is allowing driverless cars
| maybe they should have rudimentary training and standards for
| personnel to avoid unsafe situations.
|
| Ditto for the firemen and fire hoses - ORANGE CONES are what
| tells me not to drive somewhere.
| alasarmas wrote:
| https://archive.li/jpVut
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-14 23:00 UTC)