I think the jury is still out on self driving vehicles, but the ever larger trucks and SUV's on our streets are a clear and present danger to life and limb. I'd focus on those in terms of street safety, as well as safe infrastructure for people walking or biking.
There seems to be very little incentive to buy a compact car in the US, especially when the calculus involves _every other driver_ is in 6000 lb death machine, with 400 more horsepower than they need and vision-blocking A-pillars the size of small cars themselves. Oversized vehicles and non-commercial trucks need to be taxed to death.
I know that larger cars need stronger A-pillars because the A-pillar is supposed to keep the cabin from getting smushed in a roll-over, and so the A-pillar needs to have a larger cross section.
But why don't they get that increased cross section by extending the A-pillar in the directions toward and away from the driver and keep its size perpendicular to that the same? That should give a stronger A-pillar without changing how much it blocks. It would slightly reduce the interior volume of the cabin bit that would come from space that normally isn't used.
Each AV will be equipped with a person that will prevent the unicornification or removes the cone after-the-fact.
I do wonder if those cones act as a reusable catalyst, once the car goes in failure mode, you just remove the cone and use it again.
Anyway, there is something more revolutionary than an AV. It’s called not driving. It requires working from home, or decent public transport. Or it requires walkable/bikeable cities. Unfortunately this really solves actual issues but it isn’t as sexy from a technological standpoint I guess.
There are people who believe we shouldn't have personal vehicles at all. Would it be OK for them to deflate the tires on Priuses and Nissan Leafs they find parked in their city?
1. The chance of getting popular support for a protest like this diminishes with the number of people you piss off. You may be able to earn some sympathy by targeting SUVs only, but doing the same with all cars wouldn't be a good strategy.
2. There are good reasons to own a car, and in some places a significant number of people may be justified in using one. Blanket targeting everyone would be unfair to those who really need it. By contrast, SUVs don't have any (significant?) utility over a regular car (other than ego boosting maybe...).
Yes! We fully support this, but we really need the EPA to close the monster SUV /truck loophole. Otherwise there is economic incentive for people to keep buying these insane trucks
It was literally the District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston’s “youth coordinator” aid who astroturfed this with some DSA people, to distract from his handling of the Tenderloin.
He got caught bragging on Twitter and then deleted the tweets. You can still find the commentary around it if you search.
This is part of a long tradition of lying for political benefit, not tactical anything.
Lol no that kid is not some mastermind behind this, though we appreciate his coning contribution, as well as his work on the Youth Commission (which is just an unpaid advisory board of young people).
Damn you really just made up a narrative in your head and now you believe it? Lmao
Harm millions especially disabled and elderly? Cruise and Waymo give zero accessible rides. But what we do have, which already exists, are buses (which all have accessible ramps) and dial-a-ride paratransit. But sorry techies there's no profit motive there.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes interference with a computer system a felony punishable by five years in Federal prison.
That’s what intentionally and maliciously blinding a self-driving car is.
That’s not something affected by local politics. FBI investigates CFAA offenses and SF office of DOJ prosecutes the charges. There is zero doubt the companies involved kicked off that process when the attacks occurred.
This is not speculation. Have fun.
Also imagine the lack of vision in not understanding that automating transport is a prerequisite to massively expanding accessibility.
You have zero ability to think in terms of growth. Short term zero sum mindset is what kills cities.
This particularly protest is elegant because it's effective exactly to the extent that self-driving cars are not adaptable—it highlights the brittleness of the system by getting a substantial effect from a small nudge.
It was a political stunt by an aide to one of SF's supervisors. It did not arise organically from people upset about self driving cars. I don't think there was anything elegant about it. Just politics as usual in SF where the progressives battle the über-progressives over meaningless issues like re-naming schools while homeless people die on the street, the Tenderloin is an open sewer, and downtown withers away. It really hurts to see what has happened to my hometown over the past decade. I blame district elections and a weak mayor, both of which have contributed to a government that is incapable of doing much of anything. I suppose ultimately the voters are to blame.
Lol we're literally people living in SF upset about self driving cars. And the no the youth comissioner you're referring to is not some mastermind behind this, but we appreciate his political activism both with coning and with volunteering to be on the youth commission advisory board :)
Dubious. A human driver is also not going to take off with a cone on their hood. So fine, you need a human to take it off, what do you expect? The next problem after that is that the technician needs to reset the car's system... because it tries really hard to fail safe when something unexpected happens? And this is meant to be proof that they're dangerous?
Weird, unexpected things happen on the road every day. Are we seriously going to potentially risk gridlocking a city (not to mention our personal safety) for the gains of a small handful of private corporation as they test this black-box tech out against us?
I think it highlights how the system is tuned to safety over all other concerns. If there had been cones put on vehicles being driven by actual humans, you'd probably have had a few bad injuries or deaths.
> I think it highlights how the system is tuned to safety over all other concerns.
To be able to focus on something above all else, you first need to be able to unequivocally define what "it" is.
What is safety? It's not always the same thing, which is why the simplistic models of these cars fail to do the right thing in some edge cases where a human would know what to do.
Generally it seems they simply slow down and stop when confused. Which unarguably is very often the safest thing to do.
But then there are the examples where the car stops, blocking emergency vehicles. Clearly not the safe thing to do. Human drivers sometimes do things like drive up into the sidewalk to clear way for an ambulance in a tight spot. Driving onto a sidewalk is nearly always the worst possible thing, but sometimes the right thing to do. It's easy for human drivers to make this judgment.
This is one of the dumbest "tactics" I've had to witness.
These are the same people falsifying data that makes autonomous vehicles appear more unsafe than they are.
"New letter from CA state accuses SF officials of data manipulation: 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."
In this case, the person doing it was an employee of Dean Preston, a city supervisor.
Regardless, the traffic cone clowning and the falsifying data clowning both are born of the same shortsighted desire to get "progressive" points by attacking evil corporations.
Wrong in multiple ways, youth comissioners are not "employees" nor aides to supes; it's essentially a volunteer advisory position for high schoolers. And no, it's not just him, and we appreciate his contribution
A piece of tape over the cameras is probably enough to immobilize most SDVs. Works on humans too.
Guarding against vandalism isn’t really the car makers job. Tires have always been easy to slash. That’s why we have laws and penalties for breaking them.
Is this vandalism, though? No actual damage is done to the car. It's even less invasive than a piece of tape, because the cone is just sitting there. It could even be done without touching the car itself. Just place a few mannequins in front and behind the car, so it can't go anywhere.
Yup. If the car is not smart enough to realize that it can drive with a cone on its hood, or that it can run over mannequins that have been purposely placed in front of it, then that's no one's fault but the manufacturer's.
I suppose it would count as harassment, but that's because it'd be done to a person. I don't think it's possible to harass a computer program. If we ignore the harassment side of it, then I don't know what law it breaks, if the object can be trivially removed by the driver.
Criminal law - mischief - which generally includes altering of property and isn't limited to damage or destruction of property. Common law - tortious interference - if the vehicle is a taxi being summoned by a customer, and it cannot fulfill the contract because of the interference of a third party intentionally preventing its movement.
"Altering" would have to include a permanent change or anything that's difficult to undo, such as completely repainting the car, or putting it upside down in such a way that it's not damaged. It could not include simply placing a lightweight object on top of the hood that anyone can remove at any time.
Tortious interference, as the name implies, is a matter of civil courts and could open up the person doing it to being sued, depending on the circumstances under which it happens. It doesn't mean they're breaking any laws.
> Tortious interference, as the name implies, is a matter of civil courts and could open up the person doing it to being sued, depending on the circumstances under which it happens.
True.
> It doesn't mean they're breaking any laws.
Yes, it does. Civil law is law (and a larger portion of the law than criminal law is), and torts are as much violations of law as crimes.
Fair enough, but still, the violation arises from the circumstances surrounding the act, not from the act itself. You could very well place a cone on top of someone's car at every available opportunity without running into this tort issue.
> Fair enough, but still, the violation arises from the circumstances surrounding the act, not from the act itself.
That's an arbitrary distinction you could equally apply to any civil or criminal violation of the law; its “the circumstancrs surrounding the act not the act itself” that distinguishes murder from perfectly legal self-defense.
Its the circumstances surrounding picking up an item and walking off with it that distinguish lawful activity from theft.
There's a definite distinction there, though, with regards to immediacy of cause and effect. "Picking up an item and walking off" is a crime or not depending on circumstances that are present at the moment the item is picked up, even if both you and I don't realize the item doesn't belong to me; the same is true for self-defense vs. murder. If I do something to you as innocuous as placing a traffic cone on the hood of your car that triggers a "for want of a nail" situation that ends up in someone terminating a business partnership with you, that's something that neither you nor I could have predicted at the time I did whatever it was to you.
(And promoting that sort of behaviour on social media is apparently just fine, destruction of property apparently isn't 'real violence', yet in many other cases, mere words are now considered to be violence)
AVs will help reduce pedestrian deaths and reduce car ownership. While they are still cars and don't solve all car problems like traffic, most reasonable urbanists seem to support them.
Really? Since when has making using something more convenient reduced ownership of it?
The less of a pain it is to take a car somewhere, the more often people will take cars places. It's very slightly possible that there will be fewer total cars all running at a higher utilization, but the mean number of cars on the road at any given time would seem like it would only go up.
> Really? Since when has making using something more convenient reduced ownership of it?
These will be more convenient, but also dramatically more expensive, and _that_ certainly reduces the ownership of things.
> the mean number of cars on the road at any given time would seem like it would only go up
That's orthogonal to the question of level of ownership -- these can both be true simultaneously.
And it may even be the case that the number of cars on the road goes down. The idea would be that if these services are convenient enough for more people to forego owning their own vehicle in favor of using a fleet, the economics on a per-trip basis would change: now, for car owners, owning a car has a high fixed cost and very low marginal cost per trip, so once you've bought the car, registered it, insured it, etc., you're incentivized to use it for as many trips as possible to recoup your investment. Using a fleet service, you would have low/no fixed costs and comparatively higher per-trip costs, meaning that for some trips, it might be cheaper to take transit, bikeshare, etc. A lot would come down to the specifics of pricing, though, so it's hard to predict with any certainty.
> These will be more convenient, but also dramatically more expensive, and _that_ certainly reduces the ownership of things.
Yes making them dramatically more expensive would reduce ownership. I suspect they will be expensive at first, but can't think of any reasons they won't get cheaper with time.
>> the mean number of cars on the road at any given time would seem like it would only go up
> That's orthogonal to the question of level of ownership -- these can both be true simultaneously.
It's not orthogonal, but they aren't completely tied together. Per-car utilization would have to go up for them both to be true.
> And it may even be the case that the number of cars on the road goes down. The idea would be that if these services are convenient enough for more people to forego owning their own vehicle in favor of using a fleet, the economics on a per-trip basis would change: ...
Again this seems to presuppose that self-driving cars will require a significantly higher capital outlay (or perhaps that cities not named "New York" will make parking significantly more burdensome, though that could happen without self-driving cars). If a new self-driving car costs a few thousand more than a non-self driving car, and enough people buy new ones that a thriving used market occurs, the outcome would instead be to move people from "Of course I take transit to work; it's only a bit longer and I can read" towards using cars.
Making all cars more expensive would reduce car ownership. Adding extra expensive cars while keeping constant (or even reducing*) the price of cars at the bottom won't.
*if everyone suddenly wants to buy the amazing new self-serving cars then that could effect the used car market
Again, I feel like there are so many what-ifs that it's hard to say for certain. If it were to turn out that AVs were dramatically less likely to kill people than human-driven cars (seems not to be the case with current technology, but humans suck at driving, so it's not inconceivable), maybe there would be regulatory/legislative disincentives that would make human car ownership harder or more expensive.
Sure, if the government implements regulation to dissuade non-self-driving car ownership then car ownership will decrease. But that's entirely tangential. If the government decides taking cars away from poor people to reduce accidents is worthwhile they could do that tomorrow.
> The less of a pain it is to take a car somewhere, the more often people will take cars places.
That’s an increased use not increased ownership argument.
The reduced ownership argument is that AVs make on-demand use without ownership easier, reducing the degree to which regular use necessitates ownership.
> It's very slightly possible that there will be fewer total cars all running at a higher utilization, but the mean number of cars on the road at any given time would seem like it would only go up.
Sure, but that's a different issue. On the flip side, casual AV use doesn’t require parking at either end of the users trip (it still needs some place to park when idle and to the extent that is remote you get extra empty travel distance, but that’s still a lot more urban spacr use flexibility than traditional auto usage.
AVs will be largely owned by fleets, which will cause people to need to own fewer private cars, which has a number of positive effects on parking, transit, and sentiment towards non-car-oriented policies and developments.
I don't think there will be fewer total cars (unless as a sibling asserts, they will be significantly more expensive), but I admit the possibility. Many (but not all; cf. parking) of the issues of cars in urban areas are related to cars being on the road, not being owned.
> Many (but not all; cf. parking) of the issues of cars in urban areas are related to cars being on the road, not being owned.
Parking is an extremely major urban land use issue, and its related to, well, not ownership per se but vehicles being possessed and stored by the usual occupant. On-demand use of not-personally-stored (whuch probably means fleet-owned) AV’s is radically freeing for urban land use, and is probably one of the least disruptive ways to transition from car-dependent to not-car-dependent urban design, with on-demand AVs as a bridge technology.
I believe that resistance to transit and pedestrian oriented policies is higher when car ownership is higher. If you get more families to not need multiple cars or not need cars at all, then they may be more favorable to things like less street parking, no parking minimums in new buildings, protected bike lanes, fewer slip lanes, eliminating turn-on-red, etc.
I have an older relative who shouldn’t be driving, but lives in another state in a place where there’s effectively zero public transit. For them, a car is what allows them to participate in society.
The moment a self-driving car comes on the market, I’m helping them buy one. They don’t have to be perfect. One that gets my relative off the streets will be a get gain for all of us.
Whatever you think of autonomous vehicles, we should not continue to normalise maximally disruptive acts of protest by tiny groups.
Serious protest should involve serious people power, not just a handful of radicals aiming for maximum disruptive impact (usually knowing they'll face zero consequences for it, and may well turn more people against their cause, e.g 'Just Stop Oil' in the UK)
"Only protest if you have a clear majority or your protest isn't disruptive." Denies both the reason and mechanism for protests. Which I realize is probably exactly the point and I don't accept it.
Yeah, these "your protest isn't they way I want you to protest because it inconveniences me and my goal is to not be inconvenienced" is not really gonna land the way the speaker hopes.
But when you screw around with transport infrastructure, you may be putting lives at risk if emergency vehicles are held up in completely unnecessary traffic jams.
True! There are no guarantees. But every effective protest movement that I'm aware of started with a handful of people doing things that get a lot of attention.
Without such groups, nothing would ever really happen. There's an enormous power differential here, and theatrics like this is one of the few ways available to help level the playing field.
You should research the Montgomery bus boycotts then. Perhaps the most effective boycott in US history, and the only people it inconvenienced were the very people doing the boycotting.
True, although given the social situation at the time, those actions were just as transgressive as actively inconveniencing people.
I guess, really, my point is a bit broader than "inconveniencing". What seems necessary is attention-getting theatrics that actively angers those who want to maintain the status quo, and the Montgomery bus boycotts were absolutely that.
Matters of safety are not the only problem with our urban transportation systems, but the AV companies would like for you to think about it that way. It's single vector sci-fi.
Perhaps, unlike urban planners have spent decades studying and understanding urban transportation systems and their relation to the socio-economic fabric of cities, the AV companies are just part of another giant Silicon Valley circlejerk.
That's being too kind to them. Luddites didn't actively try to maintain a state of affairs that resulted in 30,000 deaths per year in their country alone. These idiots are doing just that.
You could avoid those by getting rid of cars, rather than adding more cars controlled by unaccountable programs with OTA updates pushed by people saying YOLO.
Go ahead and keep doing that, while also letting public transportation get filthier and less safe every day. See what happens to car ownership.
If you are a public transit "activist", I'd suggest trying to actually improve public transit (like enforcing fares, hiring more operators, etc) instead of continuing your crusade against cars. Otherwise, speaking from personal experience, more people will give up on public transportation and turn to personal vehicles instead.
This is bullshit and no one should listen to you. The idea that the only acceptable actions people should take are to improve one thing instead of tearing another down. The US could have let the Germans do their thing in WWI and focused on building a great alternative here at home, but sometimes it's actually worth tearing down evil over building up good.
Oh don't worry, were definitely fighting for better public transit too! Top-down successes like ensuring state bridge funding to prevent a death spiral for now (was a big multi-coalition effort), local support for new bus lanes (e.g. on Geary), to bottom-up direct action work that is secret :)
One thing I noticed on Twitter is that Tesla is doing massive damage to AV perception. Waymo has an incredible safety record, and Tesla's should probably land some people in jail. But Tesla's recklessness is driving some of the hate towards Cruise and Waymo.
Personally not sure, but it does seem this way. But it might also just be because there seem to be so many more Cruises than Waymos out on the road. And/but Waymos seem to have more drivers shuttling their cars around as well.