Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably.

They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far below the level of most Human drives.

They don't work in the rain, they can't handle construction, they block garages and driveways.

Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down.




From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do*. Drop-offs and pickups I'd like to see improvements made like getting a bit closer to the curb. Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all.

* Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic. There was zero chance a human would pull that off. Not enough time for a head check or mirror check. There wouldn't have been an accident but the Waymo clearly has insane reaction time and vision advantages - and uses them.


I saw a Waymo come to a screeching halt in a split second as a... less than intelligent individual... skateboarded in front of a bus, into the extremely busy road.

If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question.

Sometimes I'm riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I'm like "dang, why did I doubt you, robotic overload?"

The best part is that it works the same way in the day time vs the night time.

Magic.


Waymo is amazing, knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety - I would feel safer riding in a Waymo than driving myself.

My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.


Absolutely. Glad California DMV is taking the more level headed approach here and evaluating them case by case based on merit.


In the case of that particular incident, it seems that the pedestrian was “thrown” into the lane with Cruise when it was hit by another (human) driver.


Can any engineers in the field comment on whether the [very cool!] Waymo vs Cruise performance anecdotes being discussed here would have been the result of Google's millimeter-level scanning of SF? Or is it just better algos only? Or both?


I’d think better algorithms. A detailed scan of a city’s streets and layout is obsolete before it’s completed.

A driver (bot or not) needs very good reactions to bad situations observed in the field. And ideally a good sense for when a situation is one step from trouble. As a driver, if I can’t see through a bus then I’m going to assume a crazy pedestrian is waiting to jump in front of me.

(A lot of drivers are quite bad frankly and don’t do most of the stuff you’d want someone to do if they’re directing a one-ton blunt weapon around town at 35mph.)


"A lot of drivers are quite bad frankly and don’t do most of the stuff you’d want"

I'd say 90% of driving is good/safe driving is mental, with at least half of that bening based on the decision making capability. Yet our tests are mostly focused on physical ability with a small amount of memorizing a subset of the rules.


I wish we put our drivers in driving sims the way pilots have to accrue flight sim hours.


Pilots (at least to get the PPL) train at least around 40-60 hours on a live aircraft before flying solo. That's more rigorous, yet very close in principle to what we have in place to obtain a driver's permit, I'd argue.


I think it only took me a half dozen hours or so to get my license? But also that only tested me in best case scenarios with good visibility, other good drivers, etc. A better sim should test and train my response to unexpected events in less than ideal conditions.


Mine was 30 hours of lessons, 7 of behind the wheel practice. Most of that practice was very plain and simple. Parking lots, side streets, etc.

Being completely honest, I did not feel totally comfortable behind the wheel until maybe a week or of actually driving myself, post-license. (Not that I didn't have a lot more to learn, obviously)

During that week, I could have easily gotten into an accident and did have one or two closer calls.

I would not all be opposed to maybe an additional ~10 hours of more rigorous behind-the-wheel driving, or a very good-quality sim for that same amount of time.

But realistically, I'd imagine making this a hard requirement would hit some massive walls. Good simulators are expensive, everyone wants to drive, and states have very limited budgets for this sort of thing.


I certainly didn't have 40-60 hours in a car before I got my license. Much less learning permit.


In Germany it’s 28 theory lessons, at least 12 practical lessons (including night driving and Autobahn), 1 multiple choice exam, 1 practical exam to get your driver’s license. Additionally, you need to successfully attend a full-day first aid course.

The multiple choice and practical exams are not done by the school, but by an accredited / governmental institution. Each have a ~30% failure rate.

Counting 1 lesson unit as 45 minutes it’s definitely not quite as rigorous as a PPL, but certainly in the same spirit, I’d argue.


Cruise vehicles have sufficient sensor payloads to produce a 'milimeter-level scanning of SF' with many fewer hours than they've been on the road there. I doubt that provides the biggest difference. It's all down the software at this point. Especially because they're not trying to do anything crazy like vision only.


We keep hearing this is crazy, but is there evidence to back that up? At this point with hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles logging millions of miles a month, I feel like we’d be hearing non-stop reports of destruction on the highways if it really is as crazy as the average HN reader has been led to believe.


the only reason we don't hear non-stop about destruction is that you're required to keep both hands on the wheel/yolk at ALL times while FSD is activated. comparing the current cameras on a Tesla to the human eye is just silly really, sure they cover 360 which is superior, but in almost any other way, the human eye is superior having better dynamic range, better contrast, better resolution and best of all, we have eye lids. if you would just sit down and think about it for 10 mins you'll realize that gimping your self driving car by using cameras only is just a very very silly proposition when we have all this cool tech like lidar essentially giving the car super powers.


If FSD drivers were having to constantly intervene because the car couldn’t accurately map obstacles, we’d be hearing a lot more about it. I drive with FSD all the time - I could give you a list of things it needs to improve on, but not a single one has anything to do with its accuracy of understanding its surroundings.


>not a single one has anything to do with its accuracy of understanding its surroundings.

This has been my gripe for a long time. I feel like many in tech have conflated two problems. With current software the problem of perception (ie "understanding its surroundings") is largely solved*, but this shouldn't be conflated with the much more difficult problem of self-driving.

*for sure, there have been issues with perception. A glaring example is the Uber fatality in AZ.


This exactly. Reading the comments and understanding the huge gap between perception and reality of FSD is eye opening. There are a lot of armchair experts here who wouldn’t be caught dead driving a Tesla but are so confident in their understanding of its strengths, weaknesses, and the underlying reasons.


I do see stories about FSD seemingly trying to drive into obstacles fairly often. It’s true that it does see most obstacles, but most is not good enough for this.


Accuracy of surroundings is absolutely something it could improve on. Adding a different modality (like lidar) would be like adding another sense. Seeing an 18 wheeler without under guards would be easier with an additional sense. It makes the intelligence part easier because the algorithm can be more sure about it's interpretation of the environment.


No longer true. Now they use the camera to verify you're looking at the road.

Also, we can drive just fine with two cameras and a neural net, no LIDAR.

In engineering, you don't add something unless it's necessary, not because "well we may as well have it."


you listened to Musk a bit too much.

And no, a neural net and two cameras are not "just fine". The day cameras will be as good as your eyes and your neural net will be on the level of human intelligence (AGI) then maybe it would be possible. But until then you will need to rely on extra hardware to get there.

Go check on youtube how FSD behaves in city with 1/10th the complexity of SF/Waymo. And remember the difficulty is with the long tail of unexpected events.


We don't drive just fine, we routinely kill each other, often because of poor visibility or not noticing motion. Backing into a busy street? Bam. Open your door without checking? Biker down. Passing a bus at a crosswalk? Pedestrian dead. Driving at night with heavy fog? Off the cliff.

Even your basic non-fancy non-AI car these days have a variety of sonar/radar assists to help out their cameras. Tesla is just being cheap (and getting people killed because of it).


Speeding and drunk driving are the two big ones that kill people.


>with hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles logging millions of miles a month, I feel like we’d be hearing non-stop reports of destruction

Why do you believe that Tesla vehicles are driving millions of miles a month on autopilot?

I suspect that autopilot accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of Tesla miles-driven. Mostly because it sucks, but also because of how hard it is to not miss a nag on a long road trip, with the result that you are locked out of autopilot until your next stop.

(Yes, even when paying attention to the road, with your hands on the wheel. Hell, autopilot locks you out if you exceed 85 mph for more than a few seconds by pressing the accelerator, such as when passing. This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph.)

I love the performance of my Model S Plaid. Autopilot, however, is a joke.


Wow, I've had much more positive experiences with Autopilot on multi-hour highway trips. No shutoffs, no phantom braking in the last year or two. Autopilot on the highway is so much better than any other car I've driven with adaptive cruise. Anyway, the parent is comparing city and highway self-driving and they are completely different.


Tesla reported that there were 400,000 cars in the US and Canada who had access to FSD Beta in January 2023, so I don’t think that’s at all hard to believe.

Edit: Looks like back in January they were adding 10M cumulative miles driven per month (roughly) - https://insideevs.com/news/633328/tesla-fsd-beta-now-active-...


Assuming those data are accurate, it looks like you’re right.

Surprising, but it is what it is.


I probably use AP >80% of the time on the highway. From observing comments in the local Tesla groups, I'm sure there are plenty of people who behave similarly.

Millions of miles per month doesn't surprise me at all.


"This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph."

Where do you drive where the speed limit is 85 mph?


Highway 130 outside Austin, Texas has an 85 mph zone.


Poland? 140km/h is the motorway speed limit. Admittedly there aren't that many Teslas here. But they are extremely popular in Germany and you see people drive them at silly speeds.


"Extremely popular in Germany" is a bit of a stretch, from googling around, there are only around 40k Teslas out of 48 million cars overall in Germany (which is about 0.08%).


Well, yes - I think what I really meant was that they are extremely popular[among electric cars]. Whenever I drive through Germany and stop at an autohof all tesla chargers are always occupied, and you see quite a lot of them on the roads just driving around. But you're right, 40k is nothing in such a big country.


It's a bit of a stretch to just randomly drop some numbers... In the US in the last three Q's the marketshare of Tesla is 0,003868139%


Some German cars are driven at sillier speeds. I've been on the autobahn driving my Model S at well over 200 kph and been passed quite quickly by big German cars.


[flagged]


>>no

Care to expand?


There are a number of highways in Texas with an 85 mph limit.


> This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph.

Once traffic rules are enforced by autonomous cars that don't let you go over the speed limit, we can start raising the limit to more realistic levels. I guess currently it is priced in that everyone goes over by x km/h.


>Once traffic rules are enforced by autonomous cars that don't let you go over the speed limit, we can start raising the limit to more realistic levels. I guess currently it is priced in that everyone goes over by x km/h.

Bloody noghtmare fuel that, but it's been the inexhorable direction manufacturers and Governments have been pushing for for a while.

Stop making things that enable people more than it constrains them. The act of velvet glove societal manipulation is pretty damn obnoxious once you realize it's a thing.


It's the sensors and Lidar.


> knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety

Any info on this? I would love to learn more about what they're doing.


https://waymo.com/safety/ is probably your best resource. You can follow the links from there to learn about all the things they're doing with simulation, etc.


I know most of it was PR but the stuff Waymo did about showing a test course they built and actually having "unit tests" related to driving showed me they're not dumping these things on the road to make money, they're trying to get it right.

The competition:

Uber kills someone and turns out they disabled "breaking due to objects in the way" because it makes it jerkier.

Tesla is often killing the drivers because they marketed it as "auto-pilot"

Cruise rolled over someone for 20 seconds.

I would have to agree. I honestly hate regulatory capture in most industries, but perhaps Waymo's "unit tests" should be turned over to the DMV and made as the gold standard driving test for AI drivers.


> My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them

Exactly this. When I saw Tesla releasing their half-backed crap I feared they will damage the public perception so badly that we wouldn't have self-driving cars for years.


> Waymo is amazing, knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety

Such as?


[flagged]


Ah yeah, when something doesn’t conform to your narrative, it surely is an astroturf. All coming from accounts that are many years old and have thousands of karma points that leave meaningful posts on all types of topics. But the second they post about Waymo in a positive light, that instantly means astroturfing and not their true opinion based on their lived experiences.


Realistically, there are a lot of Googlers and Xooglers on Hacker News.

One of the messages in this thread is literally stating they have special knowledge of the behinds the scene workings of Waymo.

I work in the AV space and I honestly don't think there's much of a competitive mentality between the companies in the space, but at the same time there is a tendency of people to psudeo-astroturf these brands: where they know someone working at the company and take great personal pride because "I know so and so who works on self-driving cars!"


Astroturfing isn't "I have worked here and am therefore biased when expressing support for the product", it's (to quote Wikipedia) "the practice of hiding the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, grassroots participants."

If they explicitly disclose their internal knowledge or affiliation, it's not astroturfing. If they used to work for the company but are now unaffiliated, it's not astroturfing. If the company isn't knowledgeable or supporting of the effort, it's not astroturfing. etc.


Most of them did not mention any relationship: hence the "psuedo-astroturfing"

They have partial relationships that they don't feel the need to disclose.


> They have partial relationships that they don't feel the need to disclose.

Well, that's your assumption. I would preface that with "probably", since we don't know this for a fact.

> Most of them did not mention any relationship: hence the "psuedo-astroturfing"

Side note: I think you mean "quasi-", not "pseudo-". [1]

But, more to your intended point: the point I'm getting at is that that you're really stretching the definition of astroturfing here, even with the weasel wording added on it.

Astroturfing is a central campaign coordinated by a vendor in a manner as to appear decentralized. It's really an accusation against the central entity rather than as the pawns they're using in the process. So quasi-astroturfing might be a situation where (say) the vendor doesn't actually organize the campaign, but pays an advertiser who internally organizes the campaign without the knowledge of the vendor. The vendor might overlook signs that this is happening, without directly supporting it. Or they might not realize it at all. That's something that would be close to astroturfing, but not exactly it.

However, people advocating for a product due to their genuine personal opinions in a way that's clearly uncoordinated and unsupported by the vendor is not remotely "astroturfing" in any sense. It's a biased expression of opinions, with a potential conflict of interest (if they're still affiliated with that vendor).

All of which I think matters not only because words matter, but also particularly because this site's rules treat astroturfing differently from "someone is biased on the internet", and the admins very much don't want accusations of astroturfing without evidence.

[1] Pseudo- means fake, like how pseudoscience is fake science. Pseudo-astroturfing would be fake astroturfing, or the faking of fake grassroots support. Meaning you'd be accusing people of being real grassroots supporters who are pretending to be fake ones, which would make for a funny accusation.


Sure thing.


People taking it upon themselves to talk up a brand is the opposite of astroturfing, not pseudo-astroturfing.


When you're indirectly related to the brand and that's affecting your eagerness, it's something akin to astroturfing in why astroturfing is looked down on: ie. you're biased

But it doesn't have the malice/intent of astroturfing.


Everyone is biased. There are no perfectly unbiased opinions. And "having a bias" is not the same thing as astroturfing.


> One of the messages in this thread is literally stating they have special knowledge of the behinds the scene workings of Waymo.

I may have hinted as such (being an ex-Googler), and I know this thread has gotten kinda buried but I wanted to address the implication anyway.

When I left Google I sold all of my stock. My investment portfolio is independently managed and I do not advise any specific positions except for the exclusion of my current and former employers. I do not stand to gain financially from any company in the AV space.


Thank you. Contrary to other replies, you do not have to be employed directly by [Institution] expressly for the purposes of covertly pushing an agenda to be guilty of astroturfing.

What's important is the existence or appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly if you're not disclosing your connection. Having a friend who works for Google who might be upset at criticism counts. Being a former employee with stock counts. Having any kind of monetary or professional interest in FSD companies succeeding counts.

If someone is presenting their statements as that of a person who is not involved, and they actually are, their behavior is duplicitous, and justifiably characterized as astroturfing.


It's justifiably characterized as biased. We lose a useful term for distinguishing normal bias from marketing or PR instigated efforts. That's the point of the term astroturfing. It's useful in that regard. Or I suppose, if it's definition has truly shifted, was useful.


Can a stand-alone complex be an astroturf? I think so, if the social conditions that create the behavior stem from a single entity that stands to benefit.

The point of astroturfing (in comparison to the term it derives from, grassroots) is that it's not people coming together to support a policy, it's people with a vested interest in an entity taking cues from that entity to act in their interests in such a way that it appears as the former. The definition never shifted, the tactics just became less obvious. I would be less suspicious if more comments were complaining or giving measured thoughts, but they weren't.


If I may really stretch the metaphor, I'd say individuals with vested interests are more like sod. They really hold those opinions, and are motivated to express them, but do so "unnaturally". Vs commercial efforts that are entirely fake and are therefore astroturf :D


Bias exists. But by removing the financial incentive from the definition of astroturfing, you make it useless when it comes to distinguishing from bias. Otherwise you turn it into "how many degrees of separation can I find to Waymos" and it gets infinitely tenuous.

I would agree that Waymo employees or shareholders shouldn't be commenting here without disclosing their affiliation. But that's a relatively small class: Googlers (and, increasingly tenuous, Xooglers) don't get paid by Waymo and don't get exposure to it through their GSUs. You can make the claim that Waymo's success adds to Google's brand prestige and has knock-on effects, and maybe that's true to some limited extent. But comparing that to being directly paid by the company to spread propaganda is quite the reach.


>But by removing the financial incentive from the definition of astroturfing

I didn't. I pointed out the less obvious ways a financial incentive might exist.

Excuse me for being skeptical of someone who uses a cutesy nickname for former Google employees.


> I didn't. I pointed out the less obvious ways a financial incentive might exist.

You did no such thing, which is exactly the issue.


>What's important is the existence or appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly if you're not disclosing your connection. Having a friend who works for Google who might be upset at criticism counts. Being a former employee with stock counts. Having any kind of monetary or professional interest in FSD companies succeeding counts.


I feel kinda the same way about Waymo like I did about Apple as a relatively early adopter. The experience is genuinely magical, and there’s a massive gulf between Cruise and Waymo’s capabilities.

A sufficiently good product may produce customer reviews that are indistinguishable from astroturfing.


Just because some people's opinions differ from yours doesn't mean astroturfing is at play.


Did they give that reason?


The guidelines ask you not to accuse others of being shills.


"unable to move and blocking traffic" is not a new failure mode for cars. I get that it's particularly infuriating to be blocked by a car that is, mechanically, in good shape, but I don't find the story particularly damning. I've blocked traffic that long waiting for a tow truck.


The case he described is different in that, apparently, the vehicles in question lock all of their wheels and can't be accessed, even by law enforcement. A special tow has to be called in. It's a design decision made to protect the company at the expense of the public.


What's your opinion on Prop22?


I can't wait till those are generally available. I'd go out more if i could have a nice night and not have to deal with coming home later. Hell i live about 1.5h from Seattle and i never go because it's just awful (to me) dealing with cars there. If i could get a cab all the way there and back? Oh man, amazing. Or even park and ride would be nice. Cities seem so much more approachable to me if i don't need to drive them. It's a me-issue, for sure, but still.


If feel like Seattle needs an all day and weekend Sounder service, more than it needs self driving robo-taxis. 1.5 hours away you might be at the edge or beyond Sounder reach so this may not help you much unless you get a local bus to your closest station, but you can probably still just drive to your closest station and not having to have to deal with driving in the city.

If the Sounder would run like the ferries do (say every hour until like 8PM and then a couple more trips before midnight) it would really take the hassle of going to the city for much more people than robo-taxis ever could.


I am staring aghast with European eyes at a city of 4 million people where the commuter rail doesn't run outside peak hours. How do you get home if you go out for a couple of drinks with colleagues, or stay late for a call?

You shouldn't be asking for a couple of trains between 8pm and midnight. They should be every half hour, or more! Midnight until 6am on Saturday and Sunday could be every hour or two.

(I live in Copenhagen, half the population of Seattle. Commuter trains run every 20 minutes from 5-24h, every 10 6-18, all night on Friday and Saturday nights. Other trains also run, and the metro is 24/7.)


We taxpayers already spend >$30 per person-trip for the Sounder. It currently doesn't connect well to transit on either end (most users drive to it), and half the city is fighting to make sure it doesn't connect directly with the new "light rail" station. Also our light rail is longer end-to-end than the Paris metro and half the stations are on the freeway with massive parking garage and no pedestrian amenities. Riding transit in the Seattle area is insulting and demeaning.

I've ridden the train in Copenhagen. The stops are near things! Stores and parks! Apartments and hotels! Shopping malls! Like, actually right there! There's a few stops like that in Seattle, but they're also the ones with junkies nodding off, con men "looking for some gas money", and other anti-social behavior.


We sabotage our transit. The Rail Runner doesn't go all the way to terminals at ABQ. That's insane! Were the Santa Fe airport people against it? What gives?


In the wee hours catching a train and bus to get home is kind of annoying in Malmö. Mainly the buses basically stop running more than once an hour between 1-5am.

Most US towns are basically uber/taxis only at that time. I live in Austin where you could theoretically be one of the lucky 1% of the population that both lives near a train station and wants to go somewhere near where that train station is. Even then you can’t use the train past something like 11pm on weekends. Capmetro’s hours are a pretty decent source of consternation for us here


Malmö is a fifth of the size of Copenhagen, or a tenth of Seattle. Once an hour at night isn't so bad for a city that size, isn't it? The trains to Copenhagen run all night, so I can get home...


I feel this way too, having gone down the online rabbit hole of urbanist content. We don’t need cheaper Ubers, we need trains!


Even before talking about traina, you'd need to get rids of the suburbs and the clear separation of housing and commercial stuff.

There is so much thing to undo and people are so overly sensitive of the value of their property it is nearly impossible or would take centuries to fix.


One war will do. Ask Europe.


WW2 was a negative step for many of the cities affected, as it gave them the chance to test the new "car" thing.


Trains are very expensive to build and maintain, so they only work if your city has enough density to support them with sufficient ridership. America really screwed itself by building cities for cars instead of people, and it's hard to change this at this point, especially when every effort at making cities there more walkable and dense is met with fierce opposition.


America has loads of cities and metro areas with way more density than European cities with effective rail systems. You’re right that it’s hard to change due to historical choices, but it may still be worthwhile to transition as soon as possible rather than continue down the wrong path.


Do we actually? European cities that I have been to all have zones with nothing but apartment buildings in dense urban configuration that go on for miles. I've never seen something like that in the states outside of NYC.


There's a select few. Boston. Washington DC. Chicago. The only city in which not owning a car does not involve sacrifice in your lifestyle is New York City.


I think the main problem with the Sounder is not a lack of density (Seattle and Tacoma are both plenty dense; also both the rail corridor and the rolling stock already exist; only missing expensive part is the crew) but rather it is on a very congested freight corridor (particularly the north part to Everett) owned partly by the freight company. So it is hard for Sound Transit to negotiate more usage of the corridor for increased frequency.


Dunno where you are, but trains suck arse here in the UK. Its half the price to fly to Edinburgh than to take a train and my wife recently took a stressful (delays and cancellations and missed connections) two and a half hour train ride that would have taken an hour.

Honestly I think busses are far superior due to not having so many dependencies.


I would have thought this was hyperbole had I not experienced this living in Kent years ago. It's in fact worse. It was twice as expensive to take a train from Canterbury to Stansted than it was to fly from Stansted to Glasgow. Still, having experienced public transport in the UK (the Underground is everything) and everywhere else, the US car culture is the worst. It keeps poor people poor. Your car breaks down, your license gets suspended you cannot go to work. And the acres of parking tarmac filled with cars that are stationary 95% of the time. It's so ugly and such a waste of resources. I happened to live and work along one of the few routes in my city where I could get the bus to work when I first moved to the US. People at work thought I was too poor to afford a car, it was always funny to explain that public transport is the norm in most of the rest of the world.


Trains are much worse in the UK than on the continent, for sure. Especially when it comes to price.


Ya, nothing in the states is set up for that outside of maybe NYC. We just grew our urban planning post war based on cars. It is absolute insanity. Seattle is even considered one of the better cities for public transit.


The Sounder is a heavy rail train on rails that are shared with other trains (e.g. freight). It runs about 7 times per day in one direction and about 10 times per day in the other. There's no reason to run additional trains on that line, because taking it depends almost entirely on finding an empty space in parking garages that are full by about 6AM.

The Seattle area has a newer, dedicated light rail system (Link) that runs every 5-10 minutes from about 5AM to about 1:00AM. The stations are located much more conveniently and frequently, because they were placed based on where a commuter train should stop, not trying to piggyback on existing freight lines. There still isn't as much parking as there should be, but at least the stations are placed so that more than a tiny handful of people can get there without driving and parking.


I’m not so sure about that. The North line connects to Edmonds which is a major ferry terminal used by a fairly large number of people on the Kitsap peninsula, Port Townsend etc. plus another ferry terminal on Mukilteo for Whitby island. These are major connections which are unusable in the 4 trains a day frequency (Sounder only runs 2 trips and Amtrak Cascade the other 2; latter does not stop at Mukilteo). The link is good and all that but it won’t reach Everett for another 20 years and it won’t connect with the ferries either.

The South direction is a little better (and is improving even further with more Cascade runs on the horizon) but it is the same story. For example, Pyuallup and Sumner are both decent sized towns wit centrally located station, which won’t get light rail and the 1 line won’t reach Tacoma until 2035 at least. There is also a decent transit center at Lakewood, however I would argue it should probably be better to run the 620 all the way to Tacoma, from where Olympia people could jump onto a Sounder or light rail.


I agree. I actually live a bit closer to Seattle then OP, only 40 min on bus + boat (add 20 outside of commuter hour for a second bus). The Sounder doesn’t actually run anywhere near me, (well I could take the 118 south to the Tahlequah ferry terminal, 10 min boat to Point Defiance, a Pearce transit bus to Tacoma, and ride the Sounder from there; which urbanists call the “long way”). so this doesn’t affect me personally.

But you are absolutely right, Tacoma and Everett are 3rd and 4th largest cities in the state and are in the same metro area as Seattle. The north line is actually worse, only 2 trains a day (plus 2 Amtrak Cascade trains) even though there is major Ferry terminal connection at Edmonds (and a smaller but significant at Mukilteo). The Sounder service is dismal and needs to be improved (thankfully we are getting more service on the Amtrak Cascades which runs the same corridor but goes all the way to Portland and Vancouver BC. but not nearly enough)

That said, the bulk of the population in the Seattle metro area is serviced with the Link light rail. They are almost done with an extension east to Bellevue (turns out building rail on a floating bridge is hard) and eventually it will reach both Tacoma and Everett. Then they will get the frequency they deserve.

As for me, how do I get home. My ferries actually run all night (although with up to 3 hour gaps in the middle of the night) and frequently enough. If there isn’t a bus on the island, I usually just call my partner and she picks me up at the terminal, sometimes I also meet someone I know in the ferry.

The funny bit is that I actually immigrated here from Europe, and my tiny European island in the North Atlantic actually has way worse public transit system as Seattle. So for me this is a huge improvement. I’m actually going home to visit and am planning to see a friend of my play at a concert it a town 40 min from the capital, but there are no buses, so I actually have to call my mom to pick me up when the concerts are done.


I live in Ballard, so the sounder goes right by me. We (my kid and I) even watch it go by sometime. Nowhere near to get on, though, so I’ve actually never been on one before. It would be a cool way to link Ballard to downtown Seattle by rail before 2040.


Faroes? I visited during Covid, so there was no need to try staying out late.

But the population of the whole country is 1/100 of Seattle. Buses in some place during the day, and taxis at other times, is proportionate to what's available in Copenhagen.

I grew up in a small village in England. Choices for a night out were staying over at a friend's house (much preferable) or splitting the £15 taxi between several teenagers, which was a decent price as far as our parents were concerned. (Or walking for two hours and keeping the money, don't tell mum.)


> Faroes?

Not quite that tiny. Iceland. The public transit system inside the capital area is decent (probably better then Spokane’s despite being similar of size) but after midnight it is really nothing, and on the weekends the frequency gets kind of bad (not North America level bad though). However ones you go outside of the capital area the system really sucks. Despite receiving over a million tourists which more then justifies an airport train, there is only a bus every couple of hours to the airport and adjacent towns (with a pathetic shelter).


While we’re at it, could we get at least one late night/overnight Amtrak Cascades train? I’d go to a lot more Mariners or Kraken games if it didn’t mean choosing between the hassle of driving and parking or needing a hotel room after the game. If sports aren’t your thing substitute any activity that goes beyond 6pm.


The current ride pricing feels about 10-20% less than an Uber in SF - but I haven't really checked properly. So don't expect the rideshare product (Waymo One) to be a super cheap option.


This morning my coworkers rode in together in a Waymo. One told me it was $16 while an Uber would have been $35.


From my personal experience they are priced cheaper for all rides. But rarely that much cheaper - perhaps a surge time?

The variable that differs is time to pickup. I've found Waymo is generally pretty good for me in off-peak times - perhaps on average 2-3 minutes further away on average. But I have got the odd "20 minutes away" and I then just order an Uber.

But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are the same distance away. I love playing my own music and just being in my own world without another human to consider. It is truly a relaxing commute.


> But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are the same distance away. I love playing my own music and just being in my own world without another human to consider. It is truly a relaxing commute.

Not to ruin your commute, do you know if there are interior-facing cameras monitoring the passengers?


Per Google, there are cameras inside the car: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en


For how long are the recordings stored?


Are you able to play music on the car speakers from your phone? The process on iPhone seems very awkward (talking to google assistant instead of just selecting a song).


I do it the awkward way too. But I typical play an artist that I loved two decades ago and crank the volume. So "My music" wasn't the best way to describe it. More music that is just for me. I don't find their inbuilt music channels you can play from the center console to be that good. There is lots of UX things that could be done with music that wouldn't be hard.


isn't that just because the waymos are still funded by VCs? an uber might've been the same 10 years ago, but now they've achieved world domination it's time to make a profit


Waymo is fully owned by a public company. Economically they are indistinguishable from Uber (other than having a huge ad profit center to subsidize them). What VCs are you referring to?


It's still in the R&D phase though. It's not out there to make a profit like Uber or Lyft.


Waymo is definitely in the phase where they want to form a positive impression on all fronts: safety, convenience, price. Once widespread, it's possible that they'll charge more than Uber because of the extra privacy and safety in a Waymo ride.


Not to mention that Waymo will have to own their fleet and can't quietly pass depreciation costs onto their drivers like Uber does.


>Once widespread, it's possible that they'll charge more than Uber because of the extra privacy and safety in a Waymo ride.

It's possible, but I don't think it's something you can assume. Having to pay for a chauffeur isn't cheap, and that's what you're doing with Uber. A robotaxi avoids that cost since it drives itself.


Engineers are significantly more expensive than chauffeurs, especially since the chauffeurs get paid roughly minimum wage - or less. I too am very curious where pricing settles out.


Eventually when Waymo is deployed globally the expensive upfront engineering will be absolutely dwarfed by the cost savings of not having drivers.


Only if there is one engineer per car


Well no, it depends on the multiple. Minimum wage is $15000, and an engineer costs Google an average of at least 10X that in base salary, plus another 10X that in equity. I think the break-even is probably closer to 20 cars per engineer.

Currently they have ~250 cars in SF, and 2,500 employees of which about 600 are engineers.

To break even I'd say they probably need at least 12,000 cars, assuming they don't hire any more engineers and the other 1,900 employees are costless. This also assumes that the cost of the Waymo is exactly the same as a regular car, which at least today, isn't even close. And that the server infrastructure is free, and that insurance is comparable. It's probably also too early to know what the maintenance cost of these systems is compared to a vanilla vehicle.


Given how many taxis a typical city has, there's no way that the cost of engineers would come close to the cost of chauffeurs.

In fact, this is the way economics work for many forms of automation: you're replacing a large amount of labor time with a much smaller amount of engineering time. The engineering time is more expensive of course, but the much smaller amount more than makes up for the increased cost.


Litigating accidents will cost more because suddenly it's not "partner" at fault but your own people. Also, someone's gotta buy that new yacht somehow...


Uber was trying the "there can be only one" approach of operating at a loss to squeeze out competitors on both sides of their business model. The pandemic and other factors disrupted that plan. So now they are scrambling for profit while not having being configured for it.


I read that Waymo is losing 2 to 3 billion dollars a year.



Last time I checked (in SF), Uber was $16.70 for a ride I wanted to take and Waymo was $25.40.

All things being equal (or anywhere near equal), I'll pay the human driver rather than the bot.


Funny, I’d choose the opposite.


Why, you don't like people and prefer paying big companies?


Don't forget no pressure to tip your Waymo


There will be. "Donate $1 to Waymo's autonomous safety research fund?"


No, it will be the United Way. Or to help give poor children blankets.

And it will be offered, when Waymo's onboard AI detects you're on a date, verbally, so the date can hear.

So even if you give to charites in a meaningful way, you'll end up doing it again or look crass and be embarrassed. And as with many of these "at the till" charity collections, there is a fee given to the collector.

Who will be Google! Plus, not only do they get to track your co-riders, eg who you associate with, and where you go, and even all conversation in the car (anonymized, of course), now they get to track your charitable predilections, by offering choice.


Ok so say hypothetically they have the balls to record conversations in your car. Wouldn't they already be recording from your pocket?

(I know it's sarcasm and you're spot on about the charities lmao)


I wonder though.

You own the phone. And they mostly get in trouble for lying about the things they record on phone, not for doing it.

But they own the car. And is it illegal for a cabbie to listen, and then tell their boss a stock tip, or that the Jones are buying a new house?

To add distance, they could real time listen in car, process locally, and only upload highlights as tags/text, so no recording. They could also process live, and then offer services in ride, eg "notice your hair is shaggy, Google Maps says this is a good barber!", and of course if you want that referral, as a barber, Google Maps you pay.

Google can't help itself. It is like a kleptomaniac, it knows it shouldn't, but for those voices in its head(managers), do it.. do it! You know you want to, you need to, you should!

Oh it's so shiny oh god...

And it relents, turning all pure dreams into ashes.

Waymo will be the ultimate platform to know even more about you, and to monetize it further.


"It's just going to ask you a question"


In the long term, prices will be determined by what the market will bear. It will be irrelevant if Waymo is cheaper to operate because they don't have to pay a driver. And if Waymo is the only game in town, as it seems to be far ahead of everyone else, expect only a minor discount over the regular human driven cab.


Just curious about prices there. How much would a cab, Uber, or Waymo cost for a trip that takes 1.5h to do?

To me (European) that would cost a fortune... probably doing that distance for a night out would be something to do by local train or bus service.


I took an Uber to/from Seattle Airport, but that was like 7 years ago back when they were in undercutting price mode lol. Iirc it was in the $80 range (per trip).

Well worth it to me because i dislike traffic and parking that much. However i bet i could find a park and ride that's easy and save myself a decent chunk. .. not sure how to find a _safe_ park and ride, though.. heh.

Autonomous rides would be great for me though as they represent stability. Getting a driver was always a mixed bag. Would they be creepy? Talk a lot? Drive poorly? etcetc. Down in Florida i had one break the law several times and in general drive like a maniac. I don't take that many ubers/etc, but the ones i have have really felt like a mixed bag. A dice roll on all the variables, more bad than good.


Does Uber not fill this need today?


No, at least not for me. As my other comment[1] mentions, there's enough friction with ubers that it's not an enjoyable experience. I'll use them in a pinch, but i avoid them if possible.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38012649


Good grief, two skateboarders lives saved by a Waymo in two consecutive comments.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a biker partially lying in the road, trapped by his bike. I parked my van at an angle, so if it was hit from behind it should roll past him. I jumped out and performed an assessment (I'm a qualified, OK: certificated first aider). I diagnosed "pissed" and ascertained he was unharmed. We got his bike in the back of the van with the help of some concerned pedestrians who initially thought I'd hit him. I drove him home.

I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain. What sort of sensors do these Waymo things have? They will have to be really, really clever and seriously expensive.

I don't deny that eventually a vehicle with enough decent sensors and some fancy processing will outperform me but I've managed 30+ years on the road with just a few scratches, a broken wing mirror and a rear ending from an articulated lorry.

I've managed to return a hire car around Napoli (Italy) after a couple of weeks without any issues! That may not sound too impressive but have a look at the state of vehicles around St Antonio Abate etc - it looks like the locals play bumper cars. May I also note that I'm a Brit and we drive on the left. Italians don't. So I can adapt to local conditions. I have also driven across large parts of the rest of Europe and the north Americas. I can adapt to local driving styles from the "use your entire car as the indicator" as seen in the Amalfi coastal area (int al) to "no after you" as you tend to see in large parts of the UK and Eire. I can deal with all the different regulations. A classic European one you don't see elsewhere is the white diamond sign with a yellow centre that indicates that you have right of way until it is cancelled with black stripes. Then there is the French "priority to the right" thing (which has also pervaded the UK somewhat wrt roundabouts).

I can negotiate this with ease: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5628345,-1.7713341,110m/da... and this on a wing and a prayer: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@48.8654026,2.3222455,464m/dat...

I'd love to see a Weymo navigate those.


Though Waymo et al aren't really competing with unusually good drivers, more with average drivers and they are probably safer there, on the roads they have been trained for.

(one study - 100% reduction in the frequency of bodily injury claims and a 76% decrease in property damage -https://www.ktvu.com/news/waymo-says-its-driverless-cars-saf...)


The thing is most drivers should not be allowed to drive given their low training, driving standard, general lack of empathy and/or medications or substance abuse issues but society incorrectly assume driving is a right while it should be considered a privilege you earn and that can be revoked anytime based on regular tests + eventual tickets.

I estimate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allowed to drive given their current driving standards. Possibly more could be allowed after additionnal training and showing better driving standards knowing their license is at risk.


Ironically, it is very unempathetic to claim 80% of drivers lack empathy.

Your super-claim that you are indeed empathic because you're concerned about everybody else does not justify the lower-level empathy violation.

You have been P.C.'d


> Ironically, it is very unempathetic to claim 80% of drivers lack empathy.

Well I may not have phrased it correctly but I am not claiming that. Lack of empathy is one of the various causes of a majority of drivers being unfit for driving.


Ahem... "lack of empathy", how do you plan to quantify/measure that.

Also, I was under the impression that in most countries on this planet, the priviledge of being allowed to drive a car is handed out with the drivers licence, which in most countries, you actually have to have training and a test for. I also thought it was normal practice that these licenses also get revoked, based on tickets...

The only gripe I have with the system is that elderly are not automatically subjected to a regular test of their mental faculties and remaining sight. I am getting sick of 90 year old grandmas killing 3 year olds "by accident".


> Ahem... "lack of empathy", how do you plan to quantify/measure that.

That is a tricky one.

> Also, I was under the impression that in most countries on this planet, the priviledge of being allowed to drive a car is handed out with the drivers licence, which in most countries, you actually have to have training and a test for.

Training which varies a lot depending on the country. I did a lot of hours + 3000kms under supervision of my father + dedicated classes with emergency from 90kph to 0 braking on varying surfaces, including having 2 wheels on gravel and 2 wheels on pavement to be able to handle situations where the car would naturally go sideways. My Mexican partner in comparison took a handful of classes using an automatic car and only passed the test using a simulator and there you go she had her license.

> I also thought it was normal practice that these licenses also get revoked, based on tickets...

It needs an absurd amount of them for it to happen and we should still require periodic tests and knowledge refresh of the rules of the road.

> I am getting sick of 90 year old grandmas killing 3 year olds "by accident".

I am pretty sure they represent a marginal fraction of the accidents/killing compared to distracted drivers.


> I am pretty sure they represent a marginal fraction of the accidents/killing compared to distracted drivers.

In Germany, if seniors end up in traffic incidents, they are in a vast majority of cases ruled responsible for causing them [1]. They may not be the group that causes the most accidents, partially because they drive less than someone in their 40s commuting for hours every day, but the difference of at-fault cases is nonetheless significant.

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verkehrsunfaelle-senioren-1...


vThanks for postng this. It is a small step towards ensuring public safety, but it is a datapoint which might get older people to think, or more likely, revolt. Still, thanks for helping to fight the tyrany of the eldery.


Distracted or elderly, we seem to agree that regular re-evaluation of drivers would be necessary.

And yes, I know that the standards of different countries are vastly different when it comes to obtaining a drivers license. I could have bought a drivers license while in south america. I am writing this because I am blind. Entertained the thought just for fun and to be able to show how broken the system is.


Re old folk driving I think that may be a problem that could be solved by self driving tech. The trouble with just banning oldies when they are getting less good is that a lot of them rely on the car and cause less deaths than teens driving who are much less reliant on cars. I'm wondering if the tech will kick in in time for my mum who's 86. My other relatives have had to stop around 90 due to hitting stuff.


Frankly, I dont care if they rely on a car or not. All I care is how much they endanger other drivers and pedestrians. And I dont want to wait for self-driving tech for this problem to be solved either. I am a blind pedestrian. I cant jump aside if some old fart suddenly fails to react and is about to hit me. I am afraid of mentally and physically unstable drivers. AFRAID!


"I estimate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allowed to drive"

I don't know where you are but in the UK the driving test is pretty tricky. I failed it twice before passing and that was before it had the theory test added on. That was 30 years ago.

We all have our own perceptions of other drivers but you do need to try to think in their shoes. Today, whilst driving home I noticed a police car lights to the left and decided to indicate and move from lane one to two to give them room. The land rover behind me decided to undertake me and blunder through in lane one. Now the LR made a perfectly legitimate move - stay on track. They then undertook me (naughty). They did their thing and came across as wankers.


I think this ignores the way society is governed. It's easy for an engineer-mindset to think the bar to be cleared is "better than the average driver". But these systems must operate in a society that is often employing something other than an engineering mindset.

I doubt the public and their political representatives (absent regulatory capture) would turn over control to a mere average robot. Do you think, for example, most people would be okay in a drone airliner that is equivalent to the average pilot? I suspect most people would balk at the idea. A large part of the public policy piece is about trust; humans have evolved to understand and predict the behavior of other humans which leads to mental models about who can be trusted and who can't. We don't have those same evolved intuitions about robuts and, when combined, with our natural risk aversion biases, it's going to take a lot more than "average performance" to get society as a whole to fully trust robotic safety critical operations.


>(absent regulatory capture)

Yes trial attorneys will keep the bar very high for safety. As they should. But the bar in not infinitely high. Tech companies are salivating to disrupt the transportation market. They want a piece of your car payment, your insurance payment, your taxi spend. Insurance converts the minute risk of large accident costs into fixed premium payment. Lobbying helps convert financial capital into political capital and then into regulatory change. Our political process tends to follow the desires of the top 0.1% more than the bottom 40% combined.

Our current regime of car infrastructure was once unthinkable. Entire neighborhood were bulldozed to make way for highways. Yet today the government paying for highways, roads, and mandating each building be surrounded with amble parking is the status quo.


I’m not sure the original intent of the national highway system can be chalked up to the interests of the 0.1%. It’s generally attributed to national security, which is a very public interest.


While Eisenhower was inspired by the German autobahn, military use of roads was a sales talking point. The real reason for highways was to allow favored Americans to live in detached houses while still accessing city jobs. We could have it both ways!

Rail is a much more efficient way to move troops and equipment. Modern warfare requires lightning fast movement which means cargo planes. Eisenhower himself used a “New Look” policy of relying heavily on nuclear weapons so that the army could be scaled back.


After looking into a bit, I think you're right about the impetus of the national highway system. But, while rail is more efficient way to move materiel, it's also less flexible and more vulnerable. I think in that aspect, a highway system is probably preferable.


I probably should have said better than the average taxi driver as those generally don't include teenagers, 90 year olds and so on. Re the politics say human drivers in an area cause 10 deaths a year vs robot causing 6. Do you think voters are going to say we should have more deaths because humans doing it is better? That said I think people generally expect automated systems to be safe and probably self driving cars will be when they de glitch them. And then self driving cars will compete against other self driving cars more than against humans.


They have multiple radars, lidars, and cameras. They're far more capable of detecting obstacles than people are.


They have different capabilities, but it doesn't follow that such technology is better than the built-in tech in homo sapiens.


One under appreciated benefit they have is the "eyes" on a Waymo car are mounted at the corners and high above the roof, giving it a much better vantage point that just sitting in the driver seat.


It is demonstrably better. They see more and react faster. They can see around obstacles that humans can't and they never get tired or distracted.


See more in the rain y dark? Sure.

But can they look at a driver's face and realise that they are distracted with their phone and haven't seen you?


This is an important point. Humans have evolved a way to intuit the thoughts and behaviors of other drivers. It’s why people who are mentally ill are unsettling; it’s very hard to pick up on their intentions and course of action. That’s why in think the hurdle isn’t “better than the average human driver.” Because humans won’t trust a machine in the same way as another human, the level of safety for AVs may have to be much, much greater before the public as a whole trusts them with safety critical decisions.


Yes they can. They are absolutely capable of looking at gestures. That matters a lot more when you're trying to determine the intent of a pedestrian than a driver. If it's another driver, the system can also do real time physics calculations to avoid a vehicle straying into the av's trajectory. And they might even do some kind of computer vision with other drivers to determine intent. Also if another driver just hits the car because they were distracted, why would the AV be at fault?

These are really sophisticated systems and they've really thought of a lot of issues. All of these companies have hundreds, if not thousands of engineers who have been working on this problem for over a decade, as well as an army of lawyers trying to get things into compliance. I don't think "well it can't do x as well as a human" is going to hold up in 10 or 20 years when these systems are clearly much safer. Human driven cars will eventually be uninsurable.


> All of these companies have hundreds, if not thousands of engineers who have been working on this problem for over a decade,

So do a lot of tech companies that make a lot of dangerous, fraudulant, or just bad products, or that try to develop technology that never comes to fruition.

The tech is impressive, but that doesn't lead to an assumption that it must be able to do whatever is needed. I've seen enough tech hype cycles to know them when I see them. In the end it will have great strengths and great weaknesses, and we should learn what they are.


>They are absolutely capable of looking at gestures.

But 'looking at gestures' isn't the same thing as having a real-time interpretation of the sensors. This, to the point of another comment above, may be conflating 'perception' with the larger problems of 'self-driving.'

Humans see a gesture and understand the meaning very fast because we process a lot of communication on the subconscious level. If you read the safety report of the Uber incident, it shows that the self-driving system could 'see' the pedestrian, but it struggled to effectively classify them. To be fair, that was years ago and another company, but we (as the public) don't have much insight into how good (or bad) the software is.

So 'seeing gestures,' 'correctly classifying gestures', and 'correctly classifying gestures in a time-sensitive manner' are varying levels of difficulty. The last one is the one that matters for safety-critical operations, and the requirements change with the velocity of the vehicle. IMO, there should be a regulatory framework that addresses a baseline of performance on these systems.


That comparison is a very common sales technique and fallacy: Take two products, list the things product B does better than A, and therefore B is better!


I'm not sure I get what you're saying. I'm saying the waymo is probably better than me at detecting and avoiding obstacles. That is the point of this thread.


I understand what you are saying. I'm saying that argument presented doesn't support that conclusion (though it may be true for other reasons).


I do want to clarify that my comment: the skateboarder would not have died. Waymo provided a larger margin of error for the board rider than a human could possibly have.


No need for this comment - you deployed an anecdote from personal experience. That's fine.

However you finish with an assertion with no evidence. Care to elaborate? What on earth does this actually mean:

"Waymo provided a larger margin of error for the board rider than a human could possibly have."


Humans cannot react very fast, this incident comes down to fast reactions and the good all around vision in the Waymo. On these measures a human isn't competitive.


And this is just something you've decided is true or...? One sensor with determinate output based on an input from a finite set, sure I won't argue with you, but in any domain with indeterminate outputs coming from inputs that are of an infinite set, there is no meaningful notion of reaction time, there are imperfect decisions made with incomplete information at a moment during the dangerous spiral of number of possible responses shrinking and information completeness growing, (should I react now or wait until I have more information about how effective each of the dwindling number of path s available to me are shrinking) too name just one complexity.

I believe that we will get there and sooner than skeptics believe, but we are so far away from machines having driving skill equal to that of the average human driver, who happens to be driving while distracted 99% of the time.


Here an objective difference is described: a Waymo vehicle reacted to new visual information in a direction that a human driver would not be likely to be looking.


> I parked my van at an angle, so if it was hit from behind it should roll past him.

Good tip!


The yellow diamond with a black stripe puts you into "French priority to the right" mode and it's not restricted to France, it's pretty common across the continent.

I like how it's indicated with road paint here in Switzerland, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/wp6clo/who_has...


> I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain.

As opposed to what? You don’t have RADAR, or LIDAR, or echolocation, or any other way to “detect” a person in the road. You have human vision.

This is the idea behind Tesla FSD. If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough. We have cameras that can approximate human vision. All the other companies using sensors are doing so as a crutch, because they didn’t have the chops to solve the vision problem.


The correct question to ask isn't "is computer vision enough", it's "if humans had LIDAR sensors, would they use them to cause fewer road accidents".


I really don't need LIDAR. I have roughly 3 billion years of evolution and the end result - eyes, brain etc.

LIDAR is simply a sensor and a very inferior one, in general, when compared to my visual system. For starters it needs something to interpret it. My eyes have a 52 year old brain stuffed with experience behind them and it isn't always a hindrance!

I can reason about other people's driving style and react accordingly. I can also describe my actions and reasoning on internet forums.

I really do not want an inferior sensor such as LIDAR inflicted on me, nor would I want it to be the sole source of information for something that conveys me.


Quite - I don't have those sensors but I do have madly myopic (sort of corrected) stereoscopic vision and a brain, with 30 odd years experience in it. Oh and I have ears. I generally drive with the window down in town. I can look left and listen right.

My office has an entrance onto the A37 in Yeovil (1) Bear in mind we drive on the left in the UK. Picture yourself in a car next to that for sale sign and trying to turn right. That white car will be doing 20-40 mph or much more. In the distance is a roundabout (Fiveways) which is large enough to enable a fast exit and people love to accelerate out of a roundabout. As you can also see this is a hill so the other side is quite fast because cars have to brake to keep down to the speed limit of 30 mph. That's just one scenario.

Anyway, back to your idea that Tesla FSD (Full Self Driving) ie RADAR, LIDAR etc is equivalent to "me" is debatable. I do have my limitations but I can reason about them and I can reason about what FSD might mean as well.

You assert: "If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough." People and computers/cars/whatevs do not perceive things in the same way. I doubt very much that you have two cameras with a very narrow but high res central field of view with a rather shag peripheral view which is tuned for movement. Your analogue "vision" sensors should be mounted on something that can move around (within the confines of a seatbelt). Yes I do have to duck under the rear view mirror and peer around the A pillar etc.

I have no doubt that you have something like a camera with a slack handful of Google Corals, trying to make sense of what is happening but it is really, really complicated. I actually think that your best bet is not to try to replicate my or your sensors and actions but to think outside the box.

Have you ever considered a drone?

Cheers Jon

(1) - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9471642,-2.6382854,3a,75y,...


tesla vision doesn’t have an agi behind it though lol.

and why gimp ourselves. if we had an extra sense to navigate with we would 100% be using it.


A rock instead of a hammer is also probably "good enough". Still a bad idea.


Surely, some of those "double take(s)" are because you're not driving and thus, not on alert like you would/should/better be if you were driving.


I wonder if this will become new pedestrian behavior? Once people learn that waymo will stop for them no matter what they can just cross in front of it.


Human drivers are supposed to stop too.


Or maybe they know they can do anything in front of the car because it will always yield. It will be interesting to see the game theory develop when most of the roads are full of driverless cars so you can gain an edge on the road risk free


I don’t know about “do anything in front of the car”… it’s still a several thousand pound mass that isn’t exempt from the laws of physics… but I for one would be MUCH more willing to be a cyclist on the road if most of the cars were autonomous vehicles behaving within the letter of the law.


s/overload/overlord


You are on a technology forum you should know better than call it magic, it's talent and sweat.


Yes, but.

Attributing every great outcome to "talent and sweat" is dangerous in safety critical domains. Often it's (at least partly) luck, and missing that distinction (combined with a lot of human biases) can make a team confuse "being lucky" with "being good". The problem with luck is it tends to eventually run out.


Since it seems people are interested. I had one situation which this sort of thing made me a bit uneasy (So one gripe actually). I was sitting back right seat. Waymo was waiting to make an unprotected left turn over two lanes. There was a vehicle waiting to also make an unprotected left in the other direction. Behind it was a truck. Waymo made that turn where I wouldn't have. I thought it through after and it had at least two advantages over a human here. 1. It knew the car situation behind truck well before a driver would have considered it. 2. It's front lidar could see around that truck earlier than a driver could. I still provided feedback that I'd have preferred it to not make that turn even if it was safe to do so. At the end of the day I'm the customer and I want to feel safe at all times not just be safe.

This was the turn - https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7337193,-122.4350752,3a,75y,...


I've been in this situation, and it's something that seems to get tweaked every week.

They definitely pushed the "aggressive" lever up a little over the last month.

I think it's one of those cases where it's sort of obvious it can calculate trajectories and speeds much better than a human, so it's a safe manoeuvre in theory, but it "feels" bad as a passenger.

Same thing for where it can see that it can squeeze through a tight "lane" but a normal human driver would probably wait until the oncoming traffic had passed.


It's a lose lose situation. I've been reading conversation about self driving cars for years and what you always heard back in the days is that they were way too conservative on these kinds of turns and blocked traffic. Hell even in this very thread people are saying that about Cruise. Yet when they make it more aggressive, people feel unsafe.

As you say, this is something they are constantly tweaking to find the perfect middle ground. That being said, maybe people are extra hyper aware of the turns when it's a self driving car, and wouldn't bat an eye or pay attention if it was a normal taxi driver?


People have an interesting “trust curve” regarding automation. At first they’ll be very suspicious and critical of it and any issues they have will be blamed on it. Then some point later when they’re used to the system, this attitude will suddenly flip around and they’ll start regarding the system as infallible. Sounds like this might be happening here.


Fair point. When I take a passenger in a Waymo and it is there first time I'm hyper aware of the driving. But for myself personally, I'm mostly tuned out. For me it started to feel "normal" as early as about the 4th ride. So they could probably subtly adjust the "middle ground" based on the passenger's experience and feedback (As long as it doesn't create inconsistencies for surrounding vehicles).


The thing is, the capabilities are not likely to be a strict superset of a human's.

So, if you make it have the same aggressiveness on "average" by having it take advantage of its superior capabilities, those situations are going to feel sketchy to a person.


You should be able to set the "aggressive" level. I believe Tesla has this option internally on their FSD Beta. Hopefully you will be able to set this level for robot taxis and personal vehicles like you can with (some) human drivers.


Call me cynical, but this feels like a way for tech companies to absolve themselves of responsibility.

“Your Honor, the pedestrian would have never been struck if the driver had set the system in its most conservative mode as we suggest on page 1,047 of Terms and Conditions.” /s


One huge advantage sensor-equiped vehicles have is knowing velocity and acceleration of traffic around them.

Human drivers are often conservative because they don't know the speed/acceleration of a potentially colliding vehicle.

We look at something and estimate (How fast? Speeding up or slowing down?), but we don't know.

If you could put an actual number on it, I think you could drive a lot more "aggressively" and still be perfectly safe.


When a Tesla can accelerate to 60 mph in less than 2 seconds, knowing the instantaneous velocity and acceleration is not very meaningful. You really need to be able to predict what the acceleration profile will look like over the next N seconds of your maneuver. Holding the currently perceived velocity and acceleration constant over the next N seconds is one naive way to do that. But the actual set of possible trajectories of the other actor is much larger, and you need to drive more conservatively to account for that.


but they don't know capabilities orf vehicles, say a vespa vs some sports bike.

While humans do and will behave differently around these vehicles.


That seems like pretty weak sauce.

If your sensors can distinguish a Vespa from a sports bike reliably, compared to all the other things that an autonomous vehicle has to cope with programming it to treat those two as different categories of vehicle shouldn’t be particularly hard.


And really we're talking about mass, right? Which is approximated by size

E.g. bicycle vs motorcycle vs Miata vs BMW 8-series vs Suburban vs tractor-trailer

Because that bounds agility, acceleration, and stopping distance, at least to the precision that it would differ in the next 10 seconds.


> at least to the precision that it would differ in the next 10 seconds.

10 seconds? 10 seconds is an eternity.

Some vehicles of similar size might be more than 1/8th of a mile apart in straight line performance in 10 seconds-- let alone the difference once we've got multidimensional vectors.


Exactly. I was thinking the longest span over which an accident could unfold.


My point is-- vehicle dynamics only make a difference in the very short term, because after like a couple of seconds, vehicles can be almost anywhere relative to you even with low performance.

(But, they can be quite different on the timescale of a second).


it only takes 0.2 seconds to turn a motorcyclist into ground beef

If you can't tell apart a bicycle from a 4-cylinder racing bike, let alone a vespa, that's what happnes. And Tesla can't. It also can't read hand signals given by cyclists. It can't tell apart a donkey and a horse.


I've been saying that vehicle dynamics is useful information in the short term. So if you're trying to argue with me, I don't think you've understood my point.

If your goal was to interject an anti-Tesla offtopic comment to the general discussion of vehicle dynamics, it was unwelcome.


To be clear and dispel your misconception:

These cars estimate rather than ‘know’.


They objectively know in a much truer sense than any human.

(Vehicle) Lidar/image multi-point calculation against a precision chronometer

(Human) Parallax and object size change estimation against an extremely irregular, low-precision chronometer


Really they both estimate, but the vehicle tends to have smaller error bars on its estimates. Which still goes to your point.


Humans are terrible at high velocity estimates. That's one of the conditions described in the accident investigation report for that Irish plane which smashed a bunch of runway lighting due to insufficient take off power.

A brand new top of the line passenger jet would say e.g. "Caution: Acceleration" because it can work out the velocity of the plane, from there the acceleration and the remaining runway length (it uses GPS to identify the runway it's on) and take off speed and conclude we won't make it. Humans only decide that after it's far too late. Because it's much earlier the annunciation allows pilots to abort takeoff and investigate from the safety of the ground - in the Irish case they'd typed the wrong air temperature in and thus the engine performance was much worse than expected, with the right air temp it would have flown just fine


With a limited understanding of truth and know, yes.


LOL. Tell race car drivers and truckers that they're inferior. Their senses are probably tuned just as finely as any vision system. You really discount non-quantitative measurements - as most tech people here do. You are wrong, though, that the best of the meat brains are so inferior.


The only thing wrong with non-quantitative measurements is that physics has a well-known quantitative bias.


In the same way a highway cop's lidar gun estimates.


It is also very important to consider the effect on other drivers.

A self driving car might calculate it can squeeze through a gap in oncoming traffic but doing so probably will cause human drivers of those cars to slam the breaks and create a large crash.

So unless they’re driving on a road where only self driving is allowed they’ll probably need to be much more conservative than they can be.

Also thinking about it, the first roads to become robot-only driven will probably be inner city streets where pedestrians abound, so no aggressive driving there either.


I'm laughing because I know that intersection well from taking my kids to basketball practice. I might have had the opposite reaction to you had my car not gone when it could. Also, you have greater visibility as a driver in the front than a passenger in the back, so it's likely that an experienced SF driver might have also done the same thing (speaking as someone who's driven in the city for over 20 years)


I get your point. But the approach to the situation differs I think. A human driver would creep into the intersection to get a better view and then go if clear. The Waymo proceeded with far more confidence. Just better vision. It starting tracking vehicles earlier than a human would (this is shown in a simplified way on the display inside - but I wasn't watching in this case). As it pulled into the intersection, it's front camera and/or lidar has a much better angle than a human driver so can make a go/no-go assessment earlier and without hesitation.


I suspect a lot of the concern could be handled by having the car display a map of moving things that it will interact with and it's projection of encounter times/distances.


To be fair, a human cab driver will usually know the dimensions of their vehicle and what they can get away with better than a random driver.


Another fun anecdote. When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once (I'm not sure they still do this). But it wasn't implemented very well at some point since the Waymo I was in was behind another one for many blocks. The wipers went at least 17 times. As an earlier adopter I provided lots of feedback. Even little things like I tried working on a laptop in the back* and when I went to type in my 1password password I reached up to cover the camera that is positioned perfectly to see my keystrokes.

* Not recommended in SF. But I imagine on the 280 it would be great one day.


> When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once

Pretty sure that's just lidars messing with Jaguar's rain sensors.


That explains a lot. Thank you.


Why is working on a laptop not recommended in SF?


The start stop traffic gave me car sickness quickly. The 280 is a 4 lane highway that, at certain times of day, adaptive cruise control gets very little workout.


May be actually getting better over time. A lot of the screen-related car sickness goes away with the refresh rate bumped up to 120Hz. These are slowly arriving to not-completely-gaming laptops fortunately.


That's interesting. I wonder if that's the same phenomenon that causes VR sickness with low refresh rates


Car sickness happens when reading a book as well. It's your inner ear being out of sync with what you are witnessing. Which is why looking out the front window helps.


There's more than one reason for the sickness to kick in. It can happen with a book, but for some people a slow refresh rate -vs- book or high refresh rate makes a massive difference.



"The" 280? Has Norcal shifted to usage of definite articles for freeways?


probably a transplant.

For those interested: _Generally_, Bay Area natives will refer to highways as "280", "101", maybe even "Highway X".

SoCal natives (and many others) will, _generally_ say: "the 101", "the 280", etc.


I was genuinely curious, haven't lived in the bay since 2011 and it seemed like it could be shifting. When I lived in the central coast it was a clear shibboleth when meeting people.


> Another fun anecdote. When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once (I'm not sure they still do this).

What is your motivation here? I can see why some think it looks like promotional material.


What do you even mean by motivation? If it's true (though it's probably a sensor error), it's perfectly reasonable to mention. And lying about it would be ridiculous. What scenario is there where you're worried about bad motivation here? It's not unrealistic for someone to like the idea.


It sounds promotional, having little other value. But the question wasn't answered; instead it was attacked - a good way to avoid answering a question. Oh well.


> But the question wasn't answered

That's because you asked a question with no valid answer.

Seriously, what would you accept as being an innocent response? Anything equivalent to "I thought it was neat" is apparently not good enough since that sentiment was already in the previous post.

If you want to accuse them of being a shill, just do it directly. (But only if you have a good enough reason to break the rule against doing so.) Don't do this roundabout "what's your motivation" thing where you implicitly reject the innocent motivation.

And why would it need to have "other value"?

> a good way to avoid answering

Since I'm the only one that responded, are you suggesting I'm in cahoots with them? Come on, dude.


a) Share some anecdotes as I was lucky enough to get early access by simply applying through the app. b) I'm a believer/early adopter and as such I guess I've enjoyed sharing my experiences.

It turned out I was wrong about the windscreen wipers. LIDAR from other vehicle tripping the rain sensors.

In any event, I do wish Waymo the very best. They aren't just trying to do something hard, they are doing it whilst getting lots of opposition from SF gov. Whether the business model works - time will tell.


Thanks!

> b) I'm a believer

That is interesting to me. Not that you shouldn't be one, or that such an attitude is new to the world, but I always wonder: Why care about a for-profit company's product? Usually these companies don't care about anything or anyone else.


> When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way

I hate “whimsical” stuff like this. Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.


> Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.

And yet, you aren't willing to accept that they have a different sense of humor without hating them. Ironic.


I don’t hate them, and never said I did. I find their childish antics annoying.


It is however, interesting to me to confirm they are aware of other AVs and can sync with them, enable better safety, and potentially could optimize routing through traffic with the combined data. Imagine if the car in front could warn the car behind of an incident, enabling it to take action before a human driver would even be aware of the incident.


> Imagine if the car in front could warn the car behind of an incident

They can, that is why cars have all this pretty lights in the back! They can warn of several things, like intention of turning, braking, accidents, is amazing.

And it works wonders if the human driver focus on the trafic ahead of the car just in front


Yeah, the lights in the back of your car can warn of exactly four things:

- The car is going to turn left (one blinking yellow light) - The car is going to turn right (one blinking yellow light) - The car is stopping (three solid red lights) - An unspecified error occurred (two blinking yellow lights).

It's not exactly a high - bandwidth form of communication. Most of the purpose of the lights behind your car is to remind other human drivers of your continued existence. As you point out, some of this deficiency can be made up by not looking at them.

Imagine a world where you could automatically talk over an intercom with the driver in front of you about traffic conditions. I bet you'd find safer, better-informed driving. Self-driving cars make that theoretically easy and humanly pleasant.


"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to appear very grown up" - CS Lewis


It's hard to get right, and almost no one gets it right. Remember when Lyft cars had pink moustaches on them?


I disagree strongly, I want more personality in the people and things I see in life. Even if I'm not a fan of someone's sense of humour I can appreciate an attempt at levity and whimsy.


That is actually an interesting question. We track how many accidents the automated cars cause, but I'm not sure how many accidents they prevent are tracked.


That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.


> by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles

Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty.

Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement.

Welch Labs has a good introductory video to this topic: https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM


Tesla just announced 500 million miles driven by FSD [1]. Per the video, were it fully autonomous they could have a 95% CI on "safer than human" at only 275 million miles [2], but obviously having human supervision ought to remove many of the worst incidents from the dataset. Does anyone know if they publish disengagement data?

[1] https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...

[2] https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?t=477


This just shows how statistics can mislead. I own a Tesla with FSD and it's extremely unsafe for city driving. Just to quantify, I'd say at its absolute best, about 1 in 8 left turns result in a dangerous error that requires me to retake control of the car. There is no way it even comes close to approaching the safety of a human driver.


I only spent 3/4 of my post adding caveats, geez. Thanks for the first hand intuition, though.


The caveats are missing the point that FSD is very obviously less safe than a human driver, unless you constrain the data to long stretches of interstate road during the day, with nice weather, clearly marked road lines and minimal construction. At that point, my "intuition" tells me human drivers probably still safer, but under typical driving conditions they very obviously are (at least with Tesla FSD, I don't know about Waymo)


The reason why I spent 3/4 of my post on caveats was because I didn't want people to read my post as claiming that FSD was safe, and instead focus on my real point that the unthinkable numbers from the video aren't actually unthinkable anymore because Tesla has a massive fleet. You're right, though, I could have spent 5/6 of my post on caveats instead. I apologize for my indiscretion.


> my real point that the unthinkable numbers from the video aren't actually unthinkable anymore because Tesla has a massive flee

Yes, I'm addressing that point directly, specifically the fact that this "unthinkable number" is misleading regardless of the number's magnitude.


FSD's imperfections and supervision do not invalidate their fleet's size and its consequent ability to collect training data and statistics (eventually, deaths per mile statistics). The low fleet size assumption in the presentation is simply toast.

If I had claimed that the 500 million number indicated a certain level of deaths-per-mile safety, that would be invalid -- but I spent 3/4 of my post emphasizing that it did not, even though you keep pretending otherwise.


You could start by comparing highway driving, where I think Tesla actually is quite good.


Tesla's mileage numbers are meaningless because the human has to take over frequently. They claim credit for miles driven, but don't disclose disconnects and near misses.

California companies with real self driving have to count their disconnects and report all accidents, however minor, to DMV. You can read the disconnect reports online.


Do you trust claims and data from Tesla?


Do you think they lied about miles driven in the investor presentation?

Nah, that would be illegal. Their statement leaves plenty of room for dirty laundry though. I'm sure they won't disclose disengagement data unless forced, but they have plenty of legal battles that might force them to disclose. That's why I'm asking around. I'd love to rummage through. Or, better, to read an article from someone else who spent the time.


> Nah, that would be illegal.

Musk has violated many rules regarding investors.


Note that it would need to drive those 275 million miles without incident to be safer than a human.

Which for Tesla's FSD is obviously not the case.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-...


Your video and my response were talking about fatal crashes. Humans don't go 100 million miles between crashes.

Has FSD had a fatality? Autopilot (the lane-follower) has had a few, but I don't think I've heard about one on FSD, and if their presentations on occupancy networks are to be believed there is a pretty big distinction between the two.


Isn't "FSD" the thing they're no longer allowed to call self driving because it keeps killing cyclists? Google suggests lots of Tesla+cyclist+dead but with Tesla claiming it's all fine and not their fault, which isn't immediately persuasive.


> Google suggests lots of Tesla+cyclist+dead but with Tesla claiming it's all fine and not their fault, which isn't immediately persuasive.

With human drivers -- are we blaming Tesla for those too?

You do you, but I'm here to learn about FSD. It looks like there was a public incident where FSD lunged at a cyclist. See, that's what I'm interested in, and that's why I asked if anyone knew about disengagement stats.


It appears that the clever trick is to have the automated system make choices that would be commercially unfortunate - such as killing the cyclist - but to hand control back to the human driver just before the event occurs. Thus Tesla are not at fault. I feel ok with blaming Tesla for that, yeah.


Is that real? I've heard it widely repeated but the NHTSA definitions very strongly suggest that this loophole doesn't actually exist:

> https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_Da...

The Reporting Entity’s report of the highest- level driving automation system engaged at any time during the period 30 seconds immediately prior to the commencement of the crash through the conclusion of the crash. Possible values: ADAS, ADS, “Unknown, see Narrative.”


"It appears" according to what?

Stuff people made up is a bad reason to blame a company.


From here[1]:

> The new data set stems from a federal order last summer requiring automakers to report crashes involving driver assistance to assess whether the technology presented safety risks. Tesla‘s vehicles have been found to shut off the advanced driver-assistance system, Autopilot, around one second before impact, according to the regulators.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/15/tesla-a...


You also need to cite them using that as a way to attempt to avoid fault.

Especially because the first sentence you quoted strongly suggests they do get counted.


Yeah, their very faux self driving package.


Can someone summarize the video? That was my first thought as well: crash data for humans is clearly underreported. For example, police don't always write reports or human drivers agree to keep it off the books.


The probability of a human driver causing a fatality on any given mile driven is 0.00000109% (1.09 fatalities occur per 100 million miles driven).

Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly.

This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years.

And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver.

Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on.

Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents.

Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.


Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.

In a similar vein, if we put geo-informed speed governors in cars that physically prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit, fatalities would also likely plummet.

But people haaaaate that idea.


I'm fine with it notifying the driver it thinks you might be speeding, but I don't like the idea of actually limiting the speed of the car. I've used several cars which had a lot of cases where it didn't track the speed right. Driving near but not in a construction zone. Driving in an express lane which has a faster posted speed than the main highway. School zones. I've seen cars routinely get these things wrong. A few months ago I was on an 85 MPH highway and Google Maps suddenly thought I was on the 45 MPH feeder. Add 20%, that's 54 MPH max speed. So what, my car would have quickly enforced the 30 MPH drop and slam on the brakes to get it into compliance?

I'd greatly prefer just automatic enforcement of speeding laws rather than doing things to try and prevent people from speeding.


Honestly I would think something like transponders on every freeway would work better than GPS. Regardless, I think everyone in the thread could think of 10 technological ways of making this work. I think the biggest barriers are political, not logistical, and definitely not engineering.


So we spend a ton of money putting in transponders and readers in cars which still have various failure modes, or we just put cameras on the highways and intersections and say "car with tag 123123 went from gate 1 to gate 2 in x minutes, those are y miles apart, average speed had to be > speed limit, issue ticket to 123123".

The toll roads could trivially automatically enforce speed limits. They already precisely know when each car goes through each gantry, they know the distance between each gantry, so they know everyone's average speed.


Mostly because I think it would glitch and get the speeds wrong

If it was 100% accurate and you couldn’t get a speeding ticket if it was active I’d be all for it


Yeah, because need to be able to use your vehicle to escape pursuers and also as a ramming weapon. I assume police would get an exception from this rule, but they don't actually have more of a legal right to use their vehicle as a weapon than anyone else, they are just less likely to be questioned on their judgement of the situation as an emergency by the DA. Probably also a second amendment violation, but the Supreme Court might be too originalist (and not textualist enough) to buy that argument, as cars did not exist in the decades surrounding the founding.


> prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit

I initially read this as "20% of the speed of light", and though you were being sarcastic.


Did you mean exceeding the speed limit by 20%?

Because what you actually said is true too, and hints at why "it would be safer" is not a good enough reason to implement something.


I doubt it. Both of these methods are very intrusive.


I sustained traumatic injuries a few months ago when a driver on a suspended learner's permit hit me. The lazy cop issued no tickets for the multiple traffic violations. He couldn't be bothered to show up for the trial and the lazy prosecutor who only notified me of the trial three days in advance went with a bare minimum wrist slap for the suspension. It's as if it officially never happened.


That's awful. The amount of egregious vehicular violence the US has tolerated is disgusting. Waymo seems like the best bet to making experiences like yours a thing of the past.


And I'm not even sure how reliable is the "miles driven" metric. I mean I'm sure you can estimate it somehow, but what's the margin of error there?


Odometers are pretty well regulated and insurance companies will often have a good record of the readings over long periods. I'm not sure how the org doing the data collection does it precisely, but pretty accurate data is out there.


It would be interesting if some kind of active/inductive measurement could be made.

As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky.

No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!


Although things are changing, the overwhelming majority of AV miles are generally-safer miles on protected highways. And yet their statistics are typically compared against vehicle miles on all road types.

Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way.

It’s not really a fair comparison.


> most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding

What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.


I’m lumping things like Tesla FSD.

But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.


Human drivers "disengage" also, though we don't think of it that way. I have aging friends who refuse to drive at night. I'll stay home in bad weather. When I was younger, I'd sometimes ask a passenger to back out of tricky parking space for me.


Yes, but we’re still comparing a highly selected set of AV miles vs the massive variety of human-driven miles.


It's not too useful to lump Tesla, Cruise, and Waymo together here. Tesla is years behind Cruise and cruise is years behind Waymo in terms of driving capability. Waymo doesn't even drive on highways, so we don't know how safe it would be (probably very safe).


>Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding

the bigger problem here is that the machine may not realize it isn't fully understanding the situation; I think that's the more common situation : a computer situational model doesn't match reality, but the machine has the confidence in perception to proceed, producing dangerous effects.


Not sure that's fair - the number of accidents in human-driven vehicles varies significantly by the human driving it. Do you compare with the teen that just obtained their license and is more interested in their phone than in driving properly, or the 65-year old doctor who's been driving for work and other purposes every day for the past 40 years? According to https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr... it's at least a 6x difference.


You compare what matters — mean accidents per mile driven. And like any actuary, you can compare distributions with finer granularity data (location, tickets, ages, occupations, collusion severity, etc). None of this is new or intractable. We can have objective standards with confident judgements of what’s safe for our roads.

As an aside, public acceptance of driverless cars is another story. A story filled with warped perspectives due to media outlets stoking the audience emotions which keep outlets in business — outrage, fear, and drama. For every story covering an extreme accident involving human drivers, there might be 100 stories covering a moderate driverless accident. No matter how superhuman autonomous cars perform, they’ll have a massive uphill battle for a positive image.


I think you compare it to the average as that's who you are encountering when on the road. You have no way of selecting the other drivers to bias toward the doctor.


Teens who’ve just gotten their license are often quite good drivers. It’s after that when they drive poorly. (This also applies to adults, to a lesser extent.)


I still want that metric restricted to geographical area. The average across the entire country seems many times outright malicious to use.


Well, obviously the number of autonomous vehicles involved in accidents is going to be lower, but that's because barely any of them exist compared to the vast majority of people driving their cars. If you had statistics on proportions though, that might be a different story.


You missed "per distance travelled" - that partially normalises the results. You still have to adjust for situation and road type (which Tesla conveniently doesn't do in their advertised numbers) for a better result.


I’ve had several low-light situations where my Tesla identified a pedestrian and applied the brakes before I did (typically dark clothing on a dark street).


This is low hanging fruit I had this feature in my 2015 Volvo.


Sure, it’s just more evidence that these automated systems improve overall safety vs. an unassisted driver. (Although I worry a bit about automation-induced inattention negating these benefits)


There are also issues like phantom braking which Teslas are prone to (or were, I'm not sure if that's better these days). That's part of a whole class of problems which the AVs suffer from which humans don't. I think the main problem is that those problems are really unpredictable to human drivers, whereas good defensive drivers will take into account what another lousy human driver might do based on lots of experience.


On the other hand, if you’re following the car in front of you too close so you cannot react to phantom breaking, the accident is on you. One of the things I appreciate the most about using autopilot/FSD everywhere is that the car maintains a safe following distance basically 100% of the time, even when someone cuts me off. Implemented (and used) consistently, this sort of adaptive cruise control by itself should solve a bunch of accident-causing hazards and other traffic issues.

I haven’t had a phantom breaking issue in a long time either, I’m not sure if this is because of the FSD package or if the underlying autopilot system has improved.


Ditto, FWIW. The car may not always behave like a human does in those circumstances[1], but at this point it's objectively much better at the attention and recognition side of the task.

[1] It tends to be more conservative than human drivers, and in weird ways. If a pedestrian seems at all to be moving in the direction of traffic, even if they're on a sidewalk and just meandering a bit, the car will try to evade (not violently, but it will brake a bit and pull to the outside of the lane).


Yeah, if anything, my Tesla’s issues seem to stem from being overly concerned about accidents than being recklessly dangerous.


The same applies to regular drivers. We do not track accidents they prevent.


Easy, humans prevent nearly 100% of the accidents. A car without a driver invariably crashes in a few seconds.

The question is how many accidents (if any) self driving prevents with respect to average human drivers.


Self-driving cars are used in a very controlled environment.

They will not function in high grass, I guess from my experience with different parktronics.

The best "off road" demonstration of self-driving and/or AI assistance I've found is this: https://media.jaguarlandrover.com/news/2016/07/jaguar-land-r...

Note they avoid going into grass. Human can deduce trails from grass profile, AI? I don't think so.

Will you count an inability to reach a lakeside as an accident? I guess, no.


We have not trained AIs to deduce trails from grass.

AIs need training before they can do things.*

*They just might be learning to do things without being trained based on the emergency behavior I see in LLMs.


My point was not about discerning track from grass, but about driving in acttual grass. Current self-driving tech uses sensors that are useless in high grass.

As for "emergency behavior" (emergent behavior, I guess) - we do not know how LLMs are trained. Thus, what you consider "emergency behavior," could very well be a part of training.


This is such an odd take I don’t know if it’s trolling. Both can be measured against similar metrics (an AV model against the avg AV/avg human or vice versa.


Or even the ones they cause, for the most part. It's notoriously difficult to get clean data about non-fatal crashes.


This Cruise debacle clearly shows it is notoriously difficult to get clean data about crashes caused by or related to self-driving vehicles.


The companies do track that data internally. It would be nice if the DMV mandated it's release to the public. But of course this type of data is a counterfactual, so much more subjective.


They should let an accident happen occasionally, and then show how it had the data to avoid it if humans had just trusted them.


Maybe of interest. There has been research by SwissRe on this topic. https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/paper-review-comparative-saf...


That's behind a paywall. Do you have a link to the SwissRe paper by chance? (Which might also behind a paywall, of course ; )



Waymo also talks about its work with SwissRe here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Qu6HNZu8g


Waymo thinks about this a lot and has posted a good video about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Qu6HNZu8g


> no human would be able to do.

You say this but as a motorcyclist I've learned to have my eyes everywhere. I suspect many others would say the same. You acclimate to the vehicle you most often control: if that's some woolly handling sluggish SUV then I suspect, no, you probably wouldn't have done well in this situation, but if you were more used to driving a vehicle that requires more attention I suspect you'd do better.


Fair point. For more context the waymo just made the right turn and there was a line of cars in front moving slowly or still. The skateboarder was crouched down and going fast between the cars and the gutter (against traffic). Perhaps from the driver's seat you'd get a glimpse of the skateboarder but it would be very late. No other cars in front made any adjustments. I did hear the skateboarder as it went by.


Maybe this is a fluke, but a few months ago an ABC reporter documented her Waymo ride and it had a couple goof ups. https://youtu.be/-Rxvl3INKSg

Ultimately, I don't think the driving screw ups were that big of a deal (just my opinion). The big deal though is the moronic lack of customer support. How hard is it really to have a customer support staff a phone call away that can reassure the customer and either debug the issue to get them sorted out or at least offer alternatives. It would do so much to improve the users perception.

So, typical Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service.

Maybe it was a just hit piece though and they cut out some contextual video? No idea.


> Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service

How can a company with THAT MUCH MONEY be THAT plagued with an issue that everyone has been shouting about for more than a decade ??

I wonder if there is a business model in contracting in Google's customer care. I'm sure someone could do a lot better with Google's customer budget. Google can start off with a few departments, and then have performance based expansion. If it goes too well, they can always get acquired in.


Because Google doesn't exists for you, it exists for shareholders. They calculated that not having customer support is more profitable, end of story.


Being a losing member of the cloud race after inventing every modern systems paradigm is profitable ? Missing the entire LLM/Diffusion cycle despite having laid the groundwork for it is profitable ?

Their peer tech companies - MSFT, AAPL, AMZN all managed to become industry leaders into a completely different sector while maintaining their moat in their original revenue sources.

Google is still only makes money on ads. Google has created a monster products in B2C search, ads and software platforms. But, their B2C services are lagging far behind, and customer service really helps here.


> no human would be able to

_defensive driving has entered the chat_

Seriously, anyone here who rides motorcycles can pipe in, but some of us out there never assume anything on the road and thusly avoid a lot of trouble because of it. Assuming incorrectly is the root cause of probably 99.999% of accidents.


There's driving without attention, there's defensive driving, and then there's ability to react to things which would be physically impossible for people to react to. You can train all you want (and yes, that will improve your survival rate significantly), but the eyes->brain->muscles->movement->car->inertia pipeline has delays we will never be able to work around.


In the real world reacting effectively is less about reflexes and more about situational awareness, anticipating what might happen, and reacting not just quickly but properly when something sudden does occur.


I think in that space ML will beat us completely. It's basically a simple optimisation problem of: these rules improve safety, here's the situation you're in, maximise rules applied and minimise changes required to apply them, repeat. The number of ideas ML can remember, test and execute is not going to be comparable with what people can do. It all relies on getting appropriate data from sensors though.


>Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all.

i'm sure this is sometimes true, but at least sometimes i'd guess that the route selections would make more sense if you saw the conditions and traffic on the route the car didn't take you on.


I’ve been nearly hit by a Waymo as a pedestrian when the thing could see me well before it passed.

I hate that they use giant SUVs, really inappropriate car for small city streets even if people love SUVs.


If this ever happens to you or anyone else here, drop them a message with the date/time/place that it happened, and they will watch the footage and probably adjust stuff to not be scary in the future. Without human feedback, it's really hard to program a machine to understand "scary", even if the machine has calculated that it won't hit you.

https://waymo.com/contact/ is the place to go.


You’re subtly gaslighting the parent poster by implying the car couldn’t have hit them and that it was just being “scary”.


Well, has it hit them? Fully automated intersection would be very "scary" for a slow meatbag, yet without accidents.


Waymo uses pretty small jaguar crossovers. Zoox uses suvs.


The Jaguar iPace is a full 4-door SUV, not a hatchback or a Rav4. Just because the rear hatch tapers down doesn't make the car smaller from a safety standpoint.

Jaguar iPace: 4800lbs, 79inch wide, 183 inches long

Pacifica: 4500lbs, 79inch wide, 204 inches long

Toyota Highlander: 4400lbs, 76inches wide, 194 inches long

Chevy Bolt: 3500lbs, 69inches wide, 163 inches long

The iPace might be great for LA but for SF it's totally inappropriate.


They look smaller than a lot of the suvs I see in the city while living here.


I finally decided to turn on the Tesla full self driving this month and it’s been a mixed bag.

Some over-cautious stuff like mentioned above but also some lane changes and adjustments that were better than what I would do.

I still prefer to drive myself so I’ll probably turn it back off at the end of the month, but I’ve got high hopes for when I’m older.


That's my experience, having been on FSD beta for almost two years now. It's still "un-human-driver-like" in a bunch of surprising ways, but the actual meat and potatoes "does it do more or less stupid stuff" is I think ahead of my own driving at this point.

At this point I trust its microdriving (lanekeeping, distance management, speed control, collision/obstacle avoidance, etc...) more than my own for sure. The higher level stuff is still a mixed bag (will it get stuck at that merge, can it make this lane change in time, does it understand that this other car is going to yield or will it stop, etc...).


Can it detect stationary obstacles at freeway speeds? Do we have good evidence? Because autopilot couldn't.


Meh, we've been here before. That's a vague and impossible point to argue. I mean, sure, yes it does. Does it for all possible obstacles? Probably not? I certainly haven't tested. This kind of "$SYSTEM must have feature $X which is possessed by $COMPETITOR or else it will fail" is just plain bad analysis. It's possible for a Tesla to (1) be a better driver than you on the whole while still (2) doing weird stuff that you're sure you never would.

FWIW: Stationary junk in the freeway causes accidents with human drivers every day, all the time. People are absolutely terrible at dodging crap in the road. But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd *never* drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would.

Basically: no, you'll never get the evidence you want to "prove" the logical construct you've created. So Teslas, to you, will never be "safe". But in the real world they obviously are.


> to "prove" the logical construct you've created

You're making guesses about my standards that aren't warranted at all. They absolutely can be met.

First off I'm specifically worried about large objects, a meter or larger.

And let's see, autopilot has done 3 billion miles? Okay, if FSD can manage 1 billion miles of freeway driving with zero or one crashes into large objects, then I'll be convinced they're solving the problem.

That should be fair, right?

> But in the real world they obviously are.

Obvious according to what?

Autopilot wasn't, because it managed to hit entire vehicles repeatedly. There is (or was) a specific warning in the manual that it might hit stationary vehicles when going over 50mph.

What makes it obvious that FSD avoids this specific problem?

> But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd never drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would.

You made this up about me from nowhere. Please never do that to anyone.


> You're making guesses about my standards that aren't warranted at all. They absolutely can be met. First off I'm specifically worried about large objects, a meter or larger.

I've personally watched my car go around trash cans and bikes in the road, and (obviously) stop for halted vehicles. So, you'll abandon this argument and concede the point? I suspect you won't, because my anecdote isn't enough for you, and those obstacles aren't sufficient proof, etc...

I think I'm more right than you want to admit. There's nothing I can say here to change your mind, and so coming here and demanding "evidence" isn't really an argument in good faith.

And an edit just to pick on this bit:

> Okay, if FSD can manage 1 billion miles of freeway driving with [emphasis in original] zero or one crashes into large objects, then I'll be convinced they're solving the problem.

That's simply a ridiculous argument. That level of safety is way, way, WAY beyond anything you get from existing transportation systems of any kind, period. A quick google shows that in that "one billion miles on the freeway", you'd expect not merely the "one accident" you're demanding, but in fact TWENTY FATALITIES (I couldn't find statistics for mere collisions, but needless to say it's going to be at least an order of magnitude or two higher).

So basically you're sitting here and glibly demanding that this product be 200x safer than its competitors before you'll consider it acceptable... and getting huffy when I call you unserious?


> So, you'll abandon this argument and concede the point? I suspect you won't, because my anecdote isn't enough for you, and those obstacles aren't sufficient proof, etc...

Are you trolling with this?

I'm asking if it can reliably do that. Of course I need more data than one person can collect. I am not being unreasonable to ask for more data than your personal experience. Most people with autopilot never saw this problem either.

And specifically I need to know about freeway speeds, because speed is an important factor.

There is plenty you could do to change my mind. If you link to something published by tesla or a government body showing autopilot and FSD accident rates by type then that would be more than enough.

> So basically you're sitting here and glibly demanding that this product be 200x safer than its competitors before you'll consider it acceptable

I'm not asking for a lack of fatalities. I'm asking for a lack of hitting stationary vehicle-scale objects on the freeway.

Do you think that particular kind of accident is responsible for a majority of fatalities, or something? My expectation is that it's a very rare kind of accident and I also feel like it's a good canary.

Also the freeway fatality rate is about 5.4 per billion miles, not 20.


It's so amazing how this discussion goes every single time.

> I'm not asking for a lack of fatalities. I'm asking for a lack of hitting stationary vehicle-scale objects on the freeway.

Exactly! You've constructed an impossible gateway to understanding; I either find a statistic to fit exactly your imagined failure mode or... I'm wrong, and you don't need to change your opinion.

I'm, sorry, I truly am, that I don't have a statistic to hand you showing the frequency with which Tesla vehicles with FSD beta hit 1m+ stationary obstacles on high speed roadways. I don't. And I won't, and likely never will.

So, again getting to the point upthread: you're safe. You can't lose this argument framed like that, and I concede that point. I'm just saying that that's not a very serious position to take if you're actually interested in genuine safety using metrics that other people care about.

> Also the freeway fatality rate is about 5.4 per billion miles, not 20.

Not the headline I saw immediately, but sure. That sounds plausible too. The fact that you want to claw back an error factor of 200 by 3.5x is also good evidence that you aren't taking the discussion seriously.


> The fact that you want to claw back an error factor of 200 by 3.5x

I don't. Again, I wasn't talking about total accident rate at all. I was talking about a much smaller number. The "200" is nonsense and that was just another reason it's wrong.

> So, again getting to the point upthread: you're safe. You can't lose this argument framed like that, and I concede that point. I'm just saying that that's not a very serious position to take if you're actually interested in genuine safety using metrics that other people care about.

Ugh. Look, I can wait for general safety statistics, but it will take longer. Those will exist, and they can convince me if they're within 2x of humans.

Maybe it's unfair for me to want specific statistics here, but it shouldn't be so hard to get them.

But it's just as unfair for you to act like a single person's anecdotes are enough. You can't just say it's "obviously" safe and treat that like a real argument. Of course the discussion is going to go the same way every time if that's the level of evidence you expect people to accept.

And I thought you were claiming that no evidence could convince me because I'm unreasonable. If your real claim is "nobody has bothered to collect much evidence, therefore there is no way to convince you without doing that job" then yes I agree and I don't think that's my problem.


I rode in an Argo car (RIP) and it avoided an accident where everyone in the car was like "where did that guy come from". It saw at an awkward angle around the corner before any human could have.


Eyes and ears open in the city... I think a lot of humans would have spared the skater too.

Waymo vehicles impress me, I've seen them perform skillfully like you describe.


I have doubts of the claim you have made. The Waymo just turned up a hill and moved out of the way of a downhill skateboarder? What is it about that that makes it something that no human could do? Was the Waymo's vision blocked before making the turn? As that's the time to determine the turn is safe.

Also, isn't there an implicit assumption that all Waymo "drivers" would perform in exactly the same way?


I’m reasonably sure I’ve done things like that. I wouldn’t need the mirror check because I would already know what’s there during the right turn. However I would personally aim to stay dead center in lane to reduce the skateboarder’s uncertainty during their own tricky maneuver.

This isn’t to say the Waymo car did a bad job. It sounds like a good choice in the situation.


> It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic.

Wonder what it would have done if it didnt have room to pull into the left lane without hitting a car. Or perhaps another skateboarder.


> In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do

Waymo has way more sensors. Most importantly, it has Lidar.


Based on this recent-ish YT [1] video Waymo is also crap, just as Cruise is, as any car that stops at a green light, on the left-lane, is a danger to all the other drivers it shares the road with.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rxvl3INKSg


There's a lot of legitimate criticism in that short video but the presenter is also extremely dishonest and biased. E.g. they end the video saying that they started with "a lot of optimism" when at the beginning of the ride they literally said that they expected the car to be unsafe. They also seem to mock the AI for obeying traffic laws like speed limits and stop signs, which is a bad start for a video like this.

Someone in the comments also mentions that the destination was in a dead end street, which may be the reason the drop-off is a 5 minute walk away. The 5 minute walk was also apparently indicated when she entered the destination. This along with the pick-up location being on the other side of the road feels like it might be the result of the AI being overly cautious. I'd find that acceptable for an "autonomous car" but not one advertised as a replacement for taxis (which as the presenter mentions are also used as accessibility aids where a 5 minute walk uphill can be unacceptable).

There's no footage of the car stopping at the green light, just her saying it's come to a full stop and then an external shot where it's already stopped. That's not enough information to call the stop "unsafe", even if it was impeding traffic. It also stopped with flashing hazards, assuming Waymo doesn't flash hazards during the entire ride (which I hope they don't). It's not clear why it stopped there but based on the little footage we have it doesn't seem very abrupt so any traffic behind it would have had plenty of time to notice and react the decelerating car in front of them.

The stop seems unnecessary and because it's AI and Waymo didn't provide additional information, it's impossible to say what caused it. The message she saw also indicates it was caused by an error, presumably a navigation issue. Although it is impossible to tell based on the editing, the issue seems to have been resolved within a few seconds. A human driver would have probably decided to just follow the direction of traffic for that amount of time, or change lines to come to a full stop at the side of the road but in an urban environment (not at highway speeds) the behavior is not completely unreasonable. What's more concerning to me is that the AI ran into a problem while in traffic that required the car to come to a complete halt and presumably wait for external (human?) intervention, green light or none.

I'd prefer a car that slowly comes to a full stop at a green light because of a software issue over one that keeps dragging a pedestrian it ran over for several seconds to avoid impeding traffic but the bigger issue with Waymo here is that the car runs into a software issue at all while in traffic.


That looks like a big annoyance, but I wouldn't call that stop dangerous.


Have you ever driven in a congested city? Someone stopping out of the blue when green is on is definitely a danger to all those around the car he/she/it is driving. Granted, that might not be the case somewhere in the middle of the US where there's a car passing every 5-10 minutes or so.


I agree with what you said, BUT

From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably.

I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday.

I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic.

2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways.

This was a good day, FWIW.

Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either.

EDIT: This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)?

That seems like a comically bad baseline.


Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse.

I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car.

I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.


I definitely agree with your point here.

That said, I don't know if the average human drives acceptably, and I'm very skeptical of a "99%" estimate, but I will say that I would prefer a fleet that consistently drove at the 40%ile of human quality vs. the current human fleet that follows the normal distribution.

If self-driving cars reach 40%ile quality, and enable us to stop the 20% worst drivers from driving (or average drivers when operating at 20%ile due to being drunk or tired), that'd be a huge win for safety.

Right now it's socially unacceptable to increase the difficulty of getting your license, or to take it away for poor performance, because cars are a necessity or near-necessity in most places. If we could provide self-driving vehicles as a fallback, perhaps we could make it easier to permanently lose your license than—checks local lawsrepeatedly killing people by driving while intoxicated[0].

[0] https://www.idrivesafely.com/dmv/indiana/laws/dui-and-dwi-la...


Yes, this is a difficult problem. When I do see the 1%ers changing lanes at 90mph without blinkers, or not using headlights; I long for stricter, automated enforcement. Points, then a suspended license.

But I also recognize that many people, having the suspended license, must now choose between never leaving home or driving with a suspended license.

I feel like better public transit, more than Self-driving cars (which will be expensive to actually own) is the answer here.

We need to lower the cost to an individual of losing driving privilege, so that we can lower the cost to society from bad drivers.


Further, you kind of assume human drivers are going to do these dangerous things, so you can anticipate them. It's more important to be predictable than to be conservative/safe.

Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.


Humans can stop dead as well, which is just as unpredictable. For example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emma-czornobaj-loses...


> it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.

Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.


Now I’m just imagining endless gridlock because an AV randomly stops mid highway, and all the other AVs reasonably stop, creating waves of backup. And this happening on a fairly frequent intermittent cycle.

Big is different, and scaling this kind of thing to majority of vehicles on the road can cause all sorts of interesting problems.

I’m not saying it’s inevitable; sure, we can and most likely will improve things on the long road to majority AV. This simply occurred to me and I hadn’t seen it articulated before so thought I’d share.


It is better than what most people do now: just keep driving hoping things are safe. If AVs are regularly stopping on the highway that implies there is a problem with the road design.


Why is a typical human driver at typical performance the baseline? The bad outcomes from driving come from the poor end of the performance, if the average autonomous vehicle avoids those long tail bad outcomes, some inconveniences like slow turns etc is a very worthy tradeoff.

Autonomous vehicles don't get drunk or sleepy, don't speed, don't leave the scene of an accident...


>Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either.

Yeah we agree?

The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.

Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.


yes, but wouldn't it be easier to remove the unsafe drivers? All of this AI would be really great at automatic traffic enforcement.

Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...


In a sane world, the existence of shitty human drivers would not be an excuse for lowering the bar for self-driving cars. It would be a reason to start treating a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roadways as a privilege rather than a right.


Who is asking for a lower bar for Cruises? I'm asking for a higher bar than humans!


> This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)?

> That seems like a comically bad baseline.

Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k.

The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline.

If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die.

We should do our best to keep standards high and increase them as technology permits, but there is no reasonable way to avoid using the current numbers as a baseline.


I think the better question is why we try to replace cars 1 to 1, even if it is in terms of mileage rather than number of vehicles. The problem isn't just drivers, the problem is cars. For most trips there are superior technological alternatives, there's just no political motivation to implement them because infrastructure is boring and it's easier to justify throwing more money at roads in the short term than investing in long term urban renewal projects to build and expand tram networks, underground transit, dedicated bus lanes and bicycle-first road networks. Especially now that the idea of "walkable neighborhoods" has cynically become a culture war issue rather than something that's objectively improving quality of life while reducing emissions and resource waste.


I like reducing car use too, but that's not what autonomous driving tech in particular is useful for.

Also I expect that a single autonomous taxi can replace more than one private car.


> I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday.

This one could be fixed tomorrow by adopting regulations that other advanced countries have had for decades.


We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. The only thing that seems to get enforced around where I live is speeding, and very unevenly: one time a month or so you see them out giving tickets like gangbusters. On all other days and for all other laws, it seems like the highway is a free-for-all: Stop sign rolling, running red lights, playing with your phone while driving, weaving in and out of traffic, burnouts, excessive noise, coal rolling, go right ahead--nobody is stopping you.


Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time. Police offers cost a lot of money to employ, and we have a lot of publicly accessible road space. Having officers even regularly stationed at 50% of the most common routes would probably take up a lot more manpower than they have now and that means more taxes to pay for them. Creating a dedicated traffic enforcement division is probably more doable/cheaper, but again, the amount of people needed is large. The problem is fundamentally that the US has a lot of extremely lightly regulated public space designed for high speed and that's why our pedestrian and auto safety record is so much worse than any other developed country.


> Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time.

Is it? Seems like heavy enforcement could pay for itself in terms of fines.


The average police officer in the Bay Area costs $200k with benefits. Can each police officer bring $200k worth of fines in per person? Moreover, what kind of a system will you create if you incentivize officers to pay their own salary through fines?


If you're saying the police is massively overfunded, yeah. Officers also already often face quotas in many places, so you already know the answer to that question.

But the better question is why would you need to have overpaid humans drive around in cars to catch speeding violations? In most of Europe you almost never get stopped by cops for traffic violations. Most speeding violations are caught by stationary radar traps, a machine can run the plates and send you the ticket by mail, including a pretty picture of the driver of the car if you want to dispute who drove it. Sometimes there are similar traps activated by passing a red light. It'll even tell you how the long the light had been red when you passed it.


The reason that doesn't happen in the US is privacy regulations and because generally speaking lower income areas are less pedestrian friendly than higher income areas, so lower income areas will probably have more speeding. Not saying I agree with these reasons but it is why the political calculus in the US exists.


> We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations.

In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases.

For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.


The problem with DLRs is that it makes cars more visible. And more vulnerable traffic participants such as bikes, pedestrians, skateboarders, etc. (that mostly don't have lights) less visible by comparison.


As someone who has spent more time participating in traffic as a pedestrian and on bike than driving cars and frequently cycles between these roles this feels like a bogus argument. DLRs make cars more visible to me even when I'm not driving a car, allowing me to better anticipate their behavior. This is especially helpful with curb-side parking.

Also bikes absolutely should have lights and are required by law to have them in my country (and to have them on at night, dusk or in reduced visibility conditions). E-bikes and e-scooters also have lights which are typically always-on regardless of lighting conditions.

Pedestrians don't normally have lights (although I've seen joggers wear hi-vis vests or head lamps, especially during early morning or late night runs) but pedestrians also don't move as rapidly and suddenly as vehicles. Plus in urban environments drivers are expected to look out for pedestrians, especially in narrower roads. "Child peeking out between parked cars" is a scenario covered several times during driver ed and the practical exam includes one emergency break without prior warning (tho in practice learners can make an educated guess about when it might be coming up, e.g. being led to a low-traffic street and instructed to "pick up speed a little").


We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)


OP is talking about cars at night without any lights on. DRLs would definitely make cars at night safer than car without any lights at all.

Not to mention, I said "at least" DRLs because DRLs are a watered down version of what the European studies show as safer, which is headlights on all the time. In the US, the brightness of DRLs is limited, so the studies are shit to begin with because they're not even using the right variables to find the safest solution.


And most new cars have an auto setting for headlights (and have for a while) that most people just leave on auto. (At least for their own cars. I never totally trust what's going on with a rental although I assume it's pretty standardized at this point.)


I'd like to see those studies because both as a driver and on bike DRL makes a huge difference. Maybe less so with stroads and massive parking lots where you don't have a lot of curb-side parking and visibility is generally good.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp says the study was in 2008. I can't find the study itself, but you might have better luck.


It boggles the mind doesn't it? Since I think the 70's in the US it has been a DOT requirement for motorcycle lights to be always on when the engine is running.

I find it remarkable that we haven't done so with cars as well. It seems like a win-win-win? Automakers (and service centers) get more money replacing more headlights, the public gets safer roads, and politicians get an easy win.


I regularly see human drivers intentionally run red lights.

Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.


I don't know the last time I've seen a driver do that. The closest I've seen is a school bus/van a few months back drive through a red light after the light had already been red for a number of seconds. (I already had a green for the left turn.)


I don't even drive that much, but I've seen this behavior twice in the past week and a few more times in the past few month: Driver stopped at non-sensor intersection in straight lane. Left turn arrow turns green, straight solid red stays red. Driver starts going and proceeds straight through intersection. I'm left wondering if this is part of the general breakdown of norms following Covid, or aging boomers not caring about tickets, or what. It could just have been a spurious pattern too, of course.


Humans should be the baseline precisely because they aren't very good. Imagine a whole fleet of hundreds of self driving car that are worst than the average human driver (who are already really bad) all making the exact same worst than human mistakes.


I don't want imagination, I want real numbers! Several groups must have them, but so far nobody is talking, except those who have reason to conceal the truth. (Average drivers includes those driving drunk, which isn't a useful compare for someone who doesn't do that)

It is not hard to imagine that self driving cars are normally better except for some situation. If we can know those situations we can also talk about hybrid where we don't allow humans to drive where they are bad, and don't allow cars to drive where they are bad. However someone with real numbers needs to talk.


> I want real numbers

Every single accident involving a self driving car in California must be reported to the DMV. In addition, miles driven and disengagements are reported. All that information is available today online (e.g. accidents [1]).

> nobody is talking

No one talks data about the biggest player Waymo because "human driver causes an accident" is not news.

In September, there were three crashes involving a Waymo car. On September 3rd and again on the 11th, a driver hit a parked Waymo car[1]. On September 30th, a car rear-ended a Waymo car stopped at a red light[1].

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...


So you observed 21 cars with issues out of the 1000 you saw, a marginal hit rate.


This is such a poor use of numbers to prove a point. Any unsafe car - one - could potentially end multiple lives. Therefore, one unsafe car is unacceptable. Look up "Vision Zero". It's possible, and should be expected from our town planners, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers.


Vision Zero is literally the least effective program out there. Almost every metric they track has gotten worse in the past 5 years


Vision zero when done correctly makes a big difference. However useful changes are often expensive so instead they do cheap things (like put up signs, and flyers) that don't really make a difference.

Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars.

We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed.

Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.


>We have the ability to do more testing and training.

This claim gets made a lot but, while I'm not sure how you would test this, I'm not really convinced that an expensive driving school and more rigorous driving test moves the needle much relative to just a lot of hours on the road and perhaps becoming more mature with age. My recollection is that my driving almost certainly approved with a year or two of driving after I got my license; you're not going to replicate that amount of driving with training/testing.


I had drivers training when I was 15. I'm now in my late 40s. How much has changed that I don't know about? I know about the zipper merge only because of an advertising push, but most drivers I know still are not aware of that. What else is new/different? I have no idea. Sure we should probably limit young drivers more (first 2 years passengers allowed only when a more experienced driver is in the passenger seat, perhaps something about low horsepower cars...), but ongoing training is completely missing from our current training and it shows.

Commercial (not private) pilots would be a good example. They regularly take refresher courses to get updated on the latest laws. They have regular simulator training so they can practice situations harder than anything they will ever encounter. They have to provide proof they are in good health. (I'm not what is legally required, or what something all airlines require but isn't legally needed).

I've seen driving simulators - not video games, but actual driving simulators. They are very good, we can require everyone spend a couple hours per year in one to show they know how to drive. We can setup situations where the other car does something stupid. We can setup situations where you will crash and have to choose the least bad crash. We can setup bikes and pedestrians to ensure that you drive safe around them. We can setup bad weather, ice on the roads. We can setup mechanical car failures. These are things that rarely happen and so you need refreshers to ensure you do the right thing should they happen to you.


I think "zero" refers to the amount of enforcement SF is willing to commit to. I commute to SF daily; I can't remember the last time I saw someone being given a ticket for a moving violation. Maybe it happens in places I don't go, but I've literally not seen it occur in the last 20 years. (Parking tickets, sure, but that's about it.) Our politicians love to pass laws and feel proud of themselves for doing so. But from where I'm sitting, I see a lot of people not caring and doing whatever they want with zero consequences.


Why blame Vision Zero for the metrics getting worse? Unless you're aware of places where all its recommendations are implemented in full, and enforced?


Vision Zero is being used to justify some of the dumbest, most shortsighted traffic changes I've seen


Yeah - same thing as only 30k /300mn Americans dying in car accidents per year, right?

A rounding error?

The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.

Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.


"accident" is a word specifically mentioned by George Carlin as a soft language euphemism for crash or collision.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566


We don't know which over the other cars were also doing unsafe things that he didn't notice. He probably didn't see everyone talking on the phone, sending texts, and other unsafe things people do that are not always obvious.


> I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic.

Did the bike lanes have a "no parking in bike lane" sign? Because (and I learned this by getting the question wrong on my CA license test when moving here) it's not illegal to park in bike lanes in CA.


If humans aren't the baseline then what is?


The baseline should be other engineering we trust with our lives, like planes, trains, ships, skyscrapers, and bridges. Society expects more from technology than from humans... that's why we use technology! Deaths from self-driving cars should be very minimal, every crash analyzed and understood, and findings publicly communicated and mandated.


It's worth noting that both Waymo and Cruise do report a shit load of statistics to regulatory bodies, including all incident reports. Neither company has caused a fatality to my knowledge.



They made this public immediately and it was physically impossible to avoid. It ran out basically right in front of the vehicle between some cars. A human driver would have hit the dog too unfortunately.


This is where I think edge cases favor the human driver.

Imagine driving by a playground and, instead of a dog, you see a ball roll across the street in front of your car, but you can already intuit that it is rolling fast enough that it won't be an obstacle in your lane. A human driver can intuit from the context (playground + ball) there is a chance a child may come running after that ball, from between those same cars.

While self-driving tech may be faster at 'seeing and classifying'* objects, is it able to predict from a larger context? I haven't seen much to indicate it can. I think that's where a lot of the edge cases are going to come from. Driving is more than just 'see object and make a decision'.

*Because most of the tech is relatively opaque to the public, this performance seems to be generally taken on faith. But what the Uber accident in AZ showed is that (with that system, at that time, at least) the self-driving tech really wasn't very good at classification in real-time.


The dog fatality might not be a human fatality but it’s still a reported fatality.

Also relevant is when Anthony Levandowski at Google / Waymo caused a freeway incident through unsafe testing: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s...

While at the time the DMV did not require reporting, later when Levandowski was on trial Google / Waymo hid the video of the incident when it’s existence was finally reported on.


Assuming that self-driving cars increase the total miles driven, then we would need to pro-rate the human baseline to account for the excess deaths caused by more miles driven.


Public transit. We like to sensationalize every small problem on American buses and trains but they're also a lot safer than cars. Many countries have implemented transit systems around the world and while the US has been designed around the car shortsightedly for decades, transit is a well-understood mode with well-understood safety considerations.


Cities have been designed around cars (or their precursor - horses/horse and carts) for much longer than decades. Individual transport is universally useful; transit is an optimisation for certain situations.


> Individual transport is universally useful

Indeed and the most individual form of transport is walking and most cities in the world are built around walking. Only the US lays its cities out to require cars. It never really laid its cities for horses and carts (with the exception of Salt Lake City.) Before the car, cities were being built around the streetcar, and before that around walking. It's not like people lived in suburbs and went around in horse and buggy lol.


> Only the US lays its cities out to require cars

I don't know where this comes from, other than the usual "US bad". Go to Johannesburg and live in a regular estate without a car.


Why are we bringing in internet baggage here? The US lays its cities out this way due to regulations that codify this. We require that businesses have a certain amount of parking, that residential areas have a certain amount of parking. We require that homes can only be so tall, must have a certain Floor-to-Area ratio. We require that roads must be classified in a local-collector-arterial classification purely based on vehicular flow. We tell civil engineers that they should only build traffic lights if a minimum amount of pedestrian volume exists but that roads need to move a minimum number of cars by default. Sidewalks are required but not even 1/10th of the FHWA codes or the MUTCD deal with pedestrian or cyclist issues. These are all facts.

I'm not familiar with South Africa, but Australia also copied a lot of US auto-centric code regulations, so have no doubt that they did as well. But they very much aren't the norm. Most of Asia (outside of Middle Eastern cities and even here it's a mixed bag with Oman being different than the rest) and Europe are built around pedestrians.

If you think I'm just angry at the US due to some internet lefty baggage, then I don't know what to say. Japan shows that cars and pedestrians can coexist fine when you don't cater to just the car.


IDK, no fatalities caused by cars?


you're describing a goal or a requirement, not a baseline.

baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles.

Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?


That's a fine baseline if your plan is to otherwise eliminate cars.

Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win.

When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis.

We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers.

However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice.

For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.


Cars are large masses moving at high velocity. If there are humans in the vicinity, "no fatalaties" is simply not an option.


No. Experienced professional human drivers, driving without time pressure.


Yes, but replacing something shitty with something shittier will not improve the status quo.

The bar for AI should be way higher than just "outperform mediocre humans".


Outperform mediocre humans means AI cars replace something shitty with something less shitty.

That means the net danger of traffic as a whole goes down.

Setting an unreasonably high bar - like "drive with perfect record" - will simply prevent that happening, and we're stuck with humans. Perfection is a north star, not an attainable goal. As long as we get net positive, the world is a tiny bit better. And then you make it a tiny bit better again. And again.

Why do you think the bar for AI should be higher than "better than what we have"?


The problem is that the bar for autonomous cars is perfection as far as public perception goes.

Right now, any incident involving a autonomous car is going to immediately be blamed on the autonomous car and not any other party, even if the fault lies entirely on the dickhead running the red light.

It won't be enough for autonomous cars to merely not cause crashes, people will expect them to actively avoid them, even in cases where a human would have failed.


> way higher

Even 10% less grievous bodily harm would be a massive improvement.


The fastest way to do that is to put size limits on personal vehicles. There has been study after study showing that the larger and heavier cars get the greater the risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...


What about the studies on deaths and injury with smaller vehicles only involving another vehicle? My guess is that it's much higher. Most families with kids want larger vehicles for exactly this reason.


> Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade.

Requiring cellphones to disable themselves in cars might be even more effective.


I’ve got 5+ rides with each platform and would agree with this assessment. Cruise rides generally have a few uncomfortable moments per ride with some erratic swerving or sudden unexplained stops.

Waymo rides feel much more predictable and human like.

Although note that “human like” and “smooth” rides do not necessarily mean safer, but qualitatively Waymo feels that way.


My day-to-day experience with Cruises on the road is much better, mile for mile, than with human drivers.

Cruise's failures, in my view, have come broadly at the long tail where their cars stall out entirely in the road due and it cascades to other Cruises.


“The long tail” are usually what causes safety issues, though. Easily identifiable and relatively high probability events are the ones more commonly mitigated. The low-probability events are the ones that tend to fall through the cracks and tend not to be obvious except in hindsight.


Should Cruise be compared to drivers as a whole? If a subset of drivers were restricted to a max speed of 30 MPH and drove very conservatively (like most CDL holders), they too would seem safer than the public. The public as a whole includes those who cut off fellow motorists, use their phone while driving, drive while drunk/high/groggy, etc.


There's literally no way you know this for a fact.


There's literally no way in which I expressed it as being known as a fact by me.

Did you make sure to reply like this to poster I replied to as well?


The comment you are replying to starts with "My day-to-day experience..."


Yes and then go on to say something they could not possibly know for a fact. In my day to day experience Cruise cars are, mile for mile, far worse than human drivers . How could I possibly know that? I've had a couple bad encounters with Cruise cars but I've had countless encounters with human drivers in between all those. How could either of us possibly know which one is better "mile for mile." It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with "in my experience" they attempt to make it sound like they're just talking about their personal experience but then they go on to say something that sounds rather objective and _could_ be measured (but wasn't).


Scene: dopamean and their partner get home from the grocery store with a trunk full of groceries. dopamean's partner knows dopamean has had a tough week at work and wants to do something nice for them.

dopamean's partner: "Hey dopamean, in my experience, the grocery bags full of canned goods are heavier than the ones full of chips. Let me take the heavier ones and you can take the lighter ones!"

dopamean: infuriated "How could you possibly know which bags are heavier? It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with 'in my experience' you attempt to make it sound like you're just talking about your personal experience but then you go on to say something that sounds objective and _could_ be measured but wasn't! Did you weigh each bag to determine their objective heft? No!"

dopamean's partner: distraught "I'm so sorry, dopamean! I will never again share informed personal experience with you about objective matters without first conducting a rigorous measurement program beforehand to confirm my priors. Thank you for showing me just how much better I can be! I can tell you're so much smarter than me and I can learn so much from you."

dopamean: angrier than anyone has ever been "Oh 'I'm so much smarter than you' am I? You fail yet again! Did you measure my IQ, did you measure yours?? Have you learned nothing!? I could easily be 3 or even 4 standard deviations below your IQ!"

Fin.


Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly?

I realize I don’t have a real concrete sense of just how many of these there are. Like is this a whole thing already?

Edit: thanks for the responses…. Good gravy…


It is limited to San Francisco, rather than the whole of California, but they do just drive around the city, especially after 9pm. As a rider, the future is here. Instead of just checking Uber and Lyft for prices to get somewhere, now I check the Cruise and Waymo app for prices too. (Well, not Cruise anymore.) But yes, it's a thing. I call a car, sometimes it doesn't have a driver, and it takes me to where I need to go in the city when I'm unable, or don't want to drive. Or more likely, don't want to deal with parking. I'll take the bus when I'm going that way but the bus doesn't always go in the right direction.

Can't wait for them to be able to take freeways over to Oakland and down to Cupertino.


Those sound like trips where you shouldn't call a car at all, but get on the local transit service. Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.

Self driving cars are useful to replace various maintenance or delivery trucks in cities, and farm transport. However mass transit is better for most things people are thinking about them for.


If the bus had dynamic routing, so it could show up where I am when I’m ready, and take me where I want to go, I’d be a huge fan. I don’t mean this ironically! I think dynamically dispatched, self-driving buses and vans will eventually save public transit. They’ll enable a much higher quality of service than current bus systems. Which drive around mostly-empty stopping every few blocks so it takes forever to get anywhere.


You don't want dynamic routing. You want frequent predictable routing.

Dynamic means you call and 1-15 minutes later a bus comes. Then it takes you to your destination, but you have no idea when you will get there because sometimes it takes long detours for someone else.

Frequent predictable routing means when you feel like leaving you just walk out the door confident that the bus will be there soon (even if you see it pulling away just as you arrive), and you quickly learn which buses to transfer to, to get where you want to be.


The problem is for the bus to stop near you, it has to stop often. To stop often, it has to move slowly, which means it will take forever to get to your destination. A separation of local and express busses you transfer between could possibly help. But if the theory is that you’re going to take a local, to get to an express, to get to a local near your destination, then you’ve wasted a ton of time on transfers. Good luck getting to your destination in less than an hour.

I’m a fan of public transit and have experienced many good public transit systems. The unfortunate truth is that in any neighborhood with less-than-extreme population density, you have to shape your life around the system by living and working near core transit lines to get reasonable travel times. That works great for people who can do that (I’ve done it myself!), but a better system could aim higher to serve the entire public. The American built environment simply can’t be adequately served by traditional bus networks.


> The problem is for the bus to stop near you, it has to stop often. To stop often, it has to move slowly, which means it will take forever to get to your destination.

Add bus lanes and smart traffic lights (giving busses permanent green waves), this stops being the case. Busses should never be stuck in traffic. That's bad for scheduling and makes them needlessly unattractive.


Living in city with frequent stops, the stops do not slow them down so much. IF you add "looking for a parking place" into estimation for a car, going by bus is frequently faster (which is why I frequently pick bus - it is more predictable and faster).


No need to look for parking when you call the robotaxi.


Then of course you wait for robotaxi.


That seems like very 20th century thinking. We should be aspiring to shape public transport to the needs of the riders instead of making the riders learn fixed routes and transfers. Waymo is very likely to be superior to existing public transportation in all dimensions for almost every transit need. There might still be a role for big buses and trains in the peak of rush hour (if that still exists).


The needs of the rider are predictable. You cannot make shared vehicles both flexible and predictable. Fixed routes are predictable and thus easy to plan your life around. When fixed routes are also frequent there is no sacrifice in that.


I don’t think the needs of the riders are predictable. Large upfront costs and static design routes are a major risk (see the Detroit public transit that serves areas no longer of much interest and is often empty). That’s why many politicians favor buses as an example; they’re flexible enough to move with demand.


Public transportation depends on a critical mass of customers with significant overlap in their trips. If you deviate from fixed routes you start to describe a taxi service.


Depends on what you’re trying to optimize for. Flexibility? Sure. Energy utilization, congestion, or GHG emissions? Probably not.


But the bus is already stopped, its in my garage waiting for me. And I don't need to figure out what bus lines I need to change to or understand their schedules, the route for this bus happens to be exactly where I want to go.

I'm generally pro-transit and continue to vote for it, but in many places and routes a car is often more convenient if one can afford it.


A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) is going to generally beat dispatched self driving cars in terms of convenience. 20 busses per hour is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city and doesn’t need any kind of routings because swapping lines has such a minimal wait time.

However, if you’ve only experienced terrible public transit then it seems like you need fundamental change rather than simply doing the same old things just better. Self driving seems like a solid fit for 2am, but driving empty vehicles only makes congestion worse.


A respectful culture is needed for public transit to properly function, and the Bay Area doesn’t have that.

Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.

And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.

So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.


Ehhh...

Frequent, accessible public transit is the main point. Anything else is more of an excuse, honestly. Nothing puts people off more than the bus being 15 minutes late on a half-hourly schedule. 5, or even 10 minute frequencies are required to get the level of service you need for people to reliably use public transit in a "turn up and go" manner.


Missing a timed transfer and having to wait 15 minutes is awful. Why did I miss my last timed transfer? Police activity on BART (again).


The more common public transit use by the general population the more you dilute the fringes of society with normal people. There’s vastly more normal people than people on the fringes of society but if it’s normal for people to drive then that’s what normal people will do. Lots of normal people also tends to enforce social conformity.

You see the same effect in any pace where the general public visits. Walmart at 6pm is a very different place than Walmart at 3AM not because the store is different but because you’re self selecting for people who don’t need to be asleep at 3AM.


Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris. So, yeah, okay that kind of behavior drives people to private vehicles… where the anti-social behavior involves shooting at each other or running people off the road.

e.g.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/15-month-old-baby-riding-in-vehicl...

https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/02/man-flashes-gun-drives-bac...

https://sfist.com/2023/06/27/chp-investigating-alleged-road-...

https://sfist.com/2023/09/06/road-rage-shooting-on-i-280-in-...

https://news.yahoo.com/sf-road-rage-suspect-leads-040649333....


A road rage incident where someone pulls out a gun is notable enough to get a newspaper article. Phone snatching, seeing people smoke meth on BART, encountering disgusting things, etc, etc are daily occurrences. This is not an apples to apples comparison.


I find your experience very different from mine. I live in Texas. I would expect a number of open carry handguns in any public place, and if someone started shouting half of those open carrying would put a hand in their gun and look tense.

OTOH, stealing a phone, smoking meth, or disgusting excretory things outside of a bathroom would be unthinkable. I would not worry if I left a cell phone on the seat if my pickup in Waxahachie or Hurst with the window down all day. I did leave my wife's cell phone in the seat of my pickup with the windows down when I ate in a restaurant in Waxahachie a day or two ago. She made fun of me for it, and I replied "It's Waxahachie."

BTW, the last car dealership I passed on the way home (before I stopped for dinner and answered this post) is called "Lifted Trucks." Seriously. You can look them up on Google Maps in Hurst, TX. LOL. This is Texas.


This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.


A small minority do crazy things anywhere. People exaggerate how often it happens.

Transit looks worse just because the people most likely to do that have 'mental issues' (possibly drug caused, but there are other causes) that also mean they can't keep a job and thus can't afford a car. However even then they are a small minority that you see because you are paying attention not because it is very common.


I encourage you to commute daily via BART for 5+ years and come away with the impression that I am "exaggerat[ing] how often it happens".


Yeah, well. It's not that you're exaggerating about how bad BART is (although there is that to some extent), it's that you're downplaying how much nonsense goes on with personal vehicles. Over the past couple decades I've commuted by car, Muni, and BART and while Bay Area transit isn't as bad as the suburbanites claim the drivers are among the worst I've experienced anywhere. At this point post-pandemic it's like a parody of Max Max.


> This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.

True.


I mean, there's a whole stretch of Lake Merritt where people go park and hotbox their cars and the drive away every single day. That doesn't make the news even though the consequences of riding BART while high are much, much lower than the consequences of piloting a car while high. And I'm sure you've seen the videos of people driving up to do what the kids these days call 'bipping' (a.k.a. snatch and grab).

Making the news isn't really a good indicator of risk here.


> Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris.

When public transit advocates dismiss such inhuman conditions as a non-concern, I can only laugh. The average driver in America will never be shot at in any point in their entire life, but by your own admission inhumane filthy conditions are so common on city buses that you saw all of the above behaviors, excepting only the assault, during a short stay in Paris. I prefer the very infinitesimally small chance of getting into some sort of Mad Max scenario in my car to a 100% chance of encountering disgusting filth on a city bus. Most Americans agree with me. Most people who say they disagree actually have no choice and when they say they prefer the bus they're just coping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

If America had a civil and clean population like Japan, then the situation could be different. Clean city buses would be inoffensive, but that's not the reality we're dealing with. The deranged antisocial population of America is substantial. Maybe you'll say that we should fix that. You bet your ass we should. But until that happens, don't expect people to put up with city buses when they have any other choice. Just because you're okay with wallowing in filth doesn't mean the rest of us should be.


The fact that there are drug addicts and people with mental health problems is a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.

Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems. Fair play but I don't think any public money should ever go to solving problems in this way.


> a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.

Then people will continue to drive, no matter how much you whine about it. If you can't make city buses safe and clean, then people won't use them.

> Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems.

In fact, owning and using a car is an effective way to avoid the filthy of city buses. You seem to think this is a mistaken belief, but you're simply wrong. You will never persuade Americans to give up their cars and use buses instead unless you acknowledge the problem of filth and fix it. You can't gas light people into thinking the filth is fine or their cars aren't an option. Denying the problem and trying to shame people who acknowledge it will never get you to the state you want society to be in.


> A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) ... is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city

When living in London a few years ago (clearly a major city), the wait times between buses were pretty short. They might have been about 6-10 minutes for some of the more central areas (rough guess from memory).

I'd be surprised if they were "every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) though".

Meanwhile, in Melbourne and Sydney though (substantial cities, but not London sized) the buses are more like 1/2 hour apart.

In Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia) the buses are 1 hour apart, and seem to stop about 7pm each night.


I'm in London and every 4 minutes isn't far off. I live in suburbia like most people and can walk 10 minutes to a high street where there and multiple routes at 8 min frequency each way, which overlap for large parts of their route, therefore some journeys really do have a bus every 3 minutes. And if it's a journey from central London to central London then there's going to be 2+ routes that serve every journey.


> driving empty vehicles only makes congestion worse.

The number of empty bus seats I see go by is astounding Those buses take up a lot of road space and block arterial traffic when people are boarding.


Buses that look empty generally have 5 people on them, and so are still more efficient use of space. Either that or at the end of the route and will soon turn around and fill up again.


you still have to get to bus stop


In San Francisco the current standard is 800–1,360 ft between bus stops depending on the grade. Street car stops are every 2–3 blocks. The MTA's spent years trying to cull stops because many are much closer than that, so no… walking to a Muni stop in San Francisco is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the city.

Edit: ca. 2008 the policy was 800–1,000 ft for bus stops and 1,000–1,200 ft for street car stops. On grades between 10–15% the standard is 500–600 ft for bus stops, and on grades above 15% the standard is 300–400 ft. Trunk routes have 24x7 service, and (I can't find it now) there are standards about the amount of service on the other routes but it's something along the lines of 80% of residences are supposed to have frequent service ~18 hours a day and reduced service in the wee hours. Currently the tightest headway I can find is 8 minutes for travel during peak hours along the busiest routes.

Muni is often inefficient but it can get you pretty much anywhere in the city (including places you can't walk to like Treasure Island) for most of the day.

Edit: For reference San Francisco is roughly 7 miles by 7 miles. So you're talking about transiting halfway across town.

Cars (with or without drivers) are competing for the same right of way as the bus, so more of them will simply slow everyone down. A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people? A self-driving car can fit, what, 5? The current quantity of Lyft/Uber/Waymo/Cruise vehicles already has a negative impact on traffic. Put enough self driving cars on the street to make up for the capacity that buses provide and you're going to make traffic much, much worse.


Two really popular locations, 3 miles apart, with a direct bus route servicing them and still 40 min travel time. This doesn't work:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dolores+Park,+Dolores+St+%26...

I'd argue that we'll be able to make this much better with driverless cars than with public transit.


It's a capacity issue. You just can't transport as many people with cars.

In a completely empty city, the first car handily beats transit. Of course.

In a traffic-laden city, separated PT tends to determine how long it takes to travel instead. 12AM it takes me 25min to get into the centre of the city - at peak hour it's more than an hour. Curiously, the train also happens to take approximately an hour to get into the city.

If public transit exists, it becomes the upper-bound for traffic travel time as if it takes longer than that people start to take the constant-time PT trip instead of the variable car trip.

In a software sense you can usually view decent PT (ie. not busses stuck in traffic) as having a high but constant time cost, whereas cars have a low but increasing cost corresponding to the traffic load (with non-separated transit incurring the same costs but being worse due to traffic stops :()


Fair argument. Public transit caps downside case and upside case. Cars can have downside but have upside too.

I want to have my cake and eat it too and I think we can with driverless cars. Lots of software tricks we can do with a network of driverless EVs + city traffic lights to dramatically increase capacity.

My roadmap for SF would be:

- allow waymo and others to scale driverless cars

- stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)

- give the same per passenger subsidy to riders of driverless cars that current public transit passengers receive per trip

- require that driverless cars in SF should send realtime destination info to the traffic light network

- remove parking spots on high traffic streets effectively creating two more lanes

- allow bus lanes to be exclusively used by driverless cars

- tax driverless car rides based on occupancy+distance+time of day so you can traffic shape


> - stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)

As long as we're throwing out fantasies, I'd like us to spend $2B more, and have the Chinatown subway run all the way out to Fisherman's Wharf and the Marina district, and also expand capabilities west out to the avenues.

I'm amazed we got the Chinatown subway and I'm excited to see the city develop around it!


Wait really? Genuinely curious. Do you think $2B was worth it?

Like I just implicitly assumed that that is way too much money for the value it provides but admittedly I didn't think much about it. Can you quantify how the benefit might be worth that much?

I think Cruise Automation has roughly raised that amount over it's entire lifetime. Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.


Congratulations you just reinvented communism. We don’t want cities making those kinds of investments for hopefully obvious reasons in that context.

Subway lines can pay for themselves across hundreds of years. It’s the best kind of investment for cities because it operates on their timescales and use ultra cheap bonds responsibly and it doesn’t interfere with free markets.


yeah it just takes forever and sometimes ends up not finishing but usually just much worse than expected.

just pick the low hanging fruit first and let driverless cars operate freely with data sharing. then build your pyramids.


and also not sure how private investment funding driverless car companies + having cities mostly just stay out of the way is communism?


People’s willingness to buy very low yield government bonds is independent from people willing to make high risk investments in private companies. Trying to get people in group A to make investments of type B through government action is the kind of central planning you don’t want.

Cities taking advantage of people with ultra low risk tolerance to make infrastructure investments at ultra low rates that only make sense with very long time horizons is dependent on markets.


no need to make anyone make any investments they don't want. private market has already funded many driverless car companies. no communism needed.


> Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.

Ahh, so by ‘we’ you didn’t actually mean a group you are part of but instead other people.


yes sorry that was confusing


Your premise is, to put it politely, completely wrong. Even considering how broad the scope was, Van Ness took well longer than it should've. The delays were almost entirely political, driven by one supervisor who was on a mission to preserve the street lights.

Meanwhile the solution you've put forth is almost entirely political and even were there general acceptance of privatizing the roads that sort of project would be mired in just as much NIMBYism. Even then you're talking about, what, refunding federal monies that have already been spent? Levying a new tax (which will require a 2/3 voter approval), subsidizing private corporations, and kneecapping transit? And for what? A system that has a fraction of the capacity of the existing bus and tram infrastructure?

Beyond the gall to suggest privatizing our roads, you're suggesting handing it all over to Google? Really? A corporation with a track record of zero customer or long-term product support is not in a position to run our roads.


Ok I agree I was being a little ambitious :) Let me tackle your points one at a time:

- cities already pay private companies to help manage the traffic infrastructure so it doesn't seem too crazy. Seems hyperbolic to claim that's "privatizing roads"

- subsidizing private corps - ok maybe we shouldn't do this. but we should stop subsidizing public transit. it should have to compete with private alternatives now that we have them. previously there were no alternatives to public transit so we kind of had to subsidize it for equity, but now I think private enterprise (given fair competition) could deliver the same outcome. Instead of subsidizing the method (public transit) we should subsidize the outcome we want (equitable access to transport - which might mean that you need to provide low income rides as a ride share provider)

- on the money spent on the SF subway and bus lane, you're right, we're not getting that back. But we can just stop doing those going forward.

- regarding van ness bus lane, I didn't know it was because of the street lamps. But that actually proves my point. Basically to make any improvement, we just have to steer clear of new physical infrastructure. I'm suggesting no new physical infra, just software.

- regarding the tax on driverless rides, we kind of already have it. SF has a 3.25% tax on all ride sharing rides. We'd just need to update that to price the tax dynamically to help traffic shape. And if we don't get that piece, it's not critical.

- on giving it to Google. Fine... not them then. Whoever can provide the best service for the lowest cost. Perfect for free markets. In fact, if we make the API to traffic system standardized, you could plugin and hot swap different providers. You could even back test new providers on historic data to see what their performance would have been like and swap to new providers as they demonstrate their improvement over the current system

- cars have a fraction of the capacity of buses - yeah only if they are fully utilized and you're not counting getting to and from the bus station nor the loss of productivity waiting for a bus


This is a great line of thinking. Public transit based on Waymo cars could be dramatically more efficient, cheaper, and more flexible.


All of these are possible to implement in a really short amount of time (because its mostly software) compared to public transit (10+ years to make a bus lane on van ness)


You skipped a few.

- Build a real time monitoring system of people travelling on these services to allow instant arrests by diverting the vehicles.

- Sell all the data to advertisers and unscrupulous individuals, who may or may not be stalking someone.

- Allow authorities to use the cars as weapons to kill dissidents and other threats to government.

Building something this complex and all-encompassing goes 90% of the way to building a dystopia.


already easier ways for those things to be done


Bad public transit doesn’t mean public transit can’t be good. It just means your local transit happens to be bad.

The crazy thing is bad transit needs a larger subsidy because people don’t want to use it. So good systems get better and bad systems get worse.


i think its just easier to make uber style driverless EVs be great than it is to make public transit great


The hard part of Uber style driverless EVs being great is having extra roads to handle the extra traffic not actually building the self driving bits.

People in NYC don’t just save money using the metro vs a Taxi they save time.


NYC is the one US city where trains almost make sense, but there are a ton of downsides related to cost, safety, etc. I'd love to see all those dedicated right-of-ways put to more efficient use with self-driving vehicles.


NYC has out of control costs. Look to Vancouver canada for a very different picture.


Great for uber is still limited by traffic and is a lot more expensive than great transit which doesn't get stuck in traffic, and thus is much cheaper than uber for better service.

Bad service is much worse on transit though.


> A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people?

It can actually fit 150.


So walking 100-200 feet vs waiting longer, entering your destination, paying more even after checking multiple apps for pricing…

I am not in great shape but I know which I prefer.


Any bus that has stops every 100-200 feet is unbearably slow. Even every 1/8 of a mile is too much to be an time efficient mode of transportation unless you have BRT imo.


I’ve said it several times but you average ~165 feet when walking to a stop every 1/8th of a mile. Max is 1/2 the distance because you can walk either direction and average is again 1/2 the max because you start at a random point not the worst possibility. 5280/8/2/2 = 165.

As to unbearably slow, there’s this idea of express busses and buss only lanes etc. The core of cities really isn’t that big, it takes forever because traffic is slow or mass transit is infrequent.


All these calculations are only true if your destination is on the road the bus runs along. Since not every road has a bus line, you also usually have to walk multiple blocks perpendicular _away_ from the bus line in addition to some of the distance between stops.


If your road doesn’t have a bus line then that’s a problem not an inherent limitation.

Ideally you want a grid where bus lines are near intersections so going from North to East means crossing 1 street so you can go anywhere with 2 waits and a street crossing.


Fair enough. Not familiar with SF bus system but the bus system where I live, which is considered quite good I think, has each bus line 1/2 mile apart from each other. Almost no one lives directly along a route so there's an extra 1/8 mile average walk just to get to the route, not a stop on it. Fine by me but a lot of people don't seem capable of that for whatever reason. Combine that with the bus not actually going to where you're trying to get and I can see why people aren't huge fans.


The reason is usually that they need a car for some journey, once they have paid that fixed cost, they may as well use it for more journeys.


(On average), for a walk to the stop of 100-200 feet the bus would need to stop every 200-400 feet. 300 ft seems to be roughly 100m, which is probably much too short a distance still. 250m or ~800 ft aligns better to my experience with cities with good transit, and in the worst case scenario you have to walk 125m to your nearest stop.


Almost.

1/8th of a mile is every 660 feet, but the farthest you can be from one is the midpoint so 330 feet. However for every trip starting at the midpoint there’s another at and the bus stop thus the average would be 1/2 that distance again or 165 feet.

Assuming a 1D world, you can beat this in practice.


Busses around me don't stop at every stop, only if there are people waiting at the stop or someone has requested a stop by pressing a strip along the windows or one of the almost dozen buttons on the bus.


show me an american city where a bus stops every 100-200 feet every 3 mins. Heck show me where it'd even be possible in an american city. That sounds like the most inefficient bus ever.


That’s a bus stop every ~1/8th of a mile not 200 feet.

You cut it in half because you can walk to the closest stop and cut it in half again before you’re starting at a random point not the worst possibility so 5280/8/2/2 = 165 feet. Except we don’t exit buildings or get on busses in the middle of the street so it’s not random.


In September, the rides I took in Cruise required walking farther than multiple bus stops.


I am not aware of a single city across the world that has such a thing, and yet public transit remains incredibly useful and functional in places not-the-US. An enormous part of Europe, for example, even in towns and cities with far less density than those here.

Can we pretty please stop acting like this is a complete enigma that nobody else has managed to figure out?


Hello from Oxford, UK, where we have the Pick Me Up[0] bus! Far more useful than standard buses, unless you live near a bus stop and need a hub and spoke journey into/out of the centre.

[0] https://www.whatsoninoxford.net/pickmeup


Neat!


AVs should in principle liberate public transit from a lot of limitations. Surge capacity should be easier to deploy. Smaller busses on smaller routes should be at less of a cost disadvantage. Pick up and drop off could be more flexible.

I live in a semi-rural area that used to have a trolley line to the next town where one could catch a train into Boston. It's also a challenge to optimize school bus routes in a sparsely populated area, and AVs could help with that.


we've had uber pool for a while. if that's your definition of public transit then sure, self driving pooled cars would obviously be good.


Oddly enough they got rid of both Uber Pool and Lyft Shared in most cities. Definitely Boston, but also half a dozen other cities I've visited. It may still exist somewhere.

I wish they hadn't, because my commuter card works with the shared rides. So even if a shared ride was the same price as a normal Uber/Lyft (or even more) I'd do it just to be able to use the commuter card.


Was this a covid thing? I wish they would bring it back.


It was supposed to be for covid I think, but worked after for a while too. The commuter card just verifies that the charge is billed as something under "transportation" (and probably that it's not airfare). It's the Lyft/Uber app that appears to stop you from using the commuter card for non-shared rides.

Honestly (and since this is a hacking forum) I have a theory that if you could hook the Lyft/Uber app with Frida or a modified kernel you could push through payment using a commuter card on regular Lyft/Uber rides.


It's pure fantasy to think public transit can replace all/most car trips in American cities, even in most of SF.

It's not just a matter of "fix service", it's you need to completely rebuild the city with 5-10x the population density.


Doesn't even need to be 5-10x the population density. The "inner ring" of Paris is similar density to San Francisco and supports a metro system that I think most would agree makes car trips unnecessary. But the "rebuild the city" part might still be somewhat necessary.


Living in a European city and relying 100% on public transit and walking, with occasional biking for longer distances, it’s easy. It does not require 5-10x the population density, maybe just 2-3x, at least compared to San Francisco (which is already somewhat dense in parts). It is not a major shift in lifestyle easier. The tallest buildings in some cities in the Netherlands are 2-3 stories, and those cities still have regular buses, trams, and trains.

There are even some suburbs full of single family homes, with yards, which still have buses every 8 minutes all day long, and long-distance commuter train service every 20 minutes.

Yes the US needs more density for this to be feasible. But San Francisco isn’t that far off on the density that it would needs


This is easier said than done. Making the density 2-3x is still a huge undertaking. With suburbs with single-family homes, this means bulldozing half of it and somehow redrawing all the property lines so the lots are 1/2 - 1/3 as large and building new houses within the new lots. You can't just magically take a subdivision full of McMansions and somehow increase density 2-3x, unless all those houses take in boarders.

Also, SF is still pretty unique compared to most American cities. So you might be able to do this stuff in SF, but not so much in places like Houston.


" it's you need to completely rebuild the city with 5-10x the population density."

Which..is exactly what is going to happen [1]?

[1] https://www.californiacitynews.org/2021/09/california-says-g...


well said


> Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.

Lots of people have been trying to get decent public transit in US cities for decades. There is so much resistance it often seems impossible.

So, yes, obviously public transit would be great. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's just not an option for most people. "Talk to your local politicians about fixing service" sounds delusional to be honest.


A small minority has been trying. A larger number of people (but still a minority) get interested in it, but they don't care about fixing transit. They just care about shoveling money to someone else (unions, contractors, artists...) and transit is one way to do that.


I agree with you in the abstract. The reality of the US political and administrative system is that it’s not possible to build new public transit, but it is possible to develop self-driving cars.


> Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.

Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?

I'll take the bus when the bus route is convenient, which is usually, and I'll take Uber/Cruise/Lyft when I'm in a hurry and it's not. I prefer public transportation but I'm more practical about it. Which includes electric scooters (Spin/Lime), or vespa scooters (Revel).


If you don't make an effort nobody will and the world gets worse '


this is satire right?


Are people this incredulous about public transit?

I love autonomous cars, but its not scalable at all. Its obvious to me that public transit is the real future as the population grows.


I think if you were building a city from scratch, it's arguable that self driving individual pods is the way to go for the most convenient AND most efficient door to door transport. Maybe you disagree, but its not important because we're not building cities from scratch.

For existing city infra and politics that we have, I think self driving is def the best way to go. Suggesting that an individual should lobby their gov't to fix public transit seems like lower probability of success than voting with their wallet for longer self driving trips.

Public transit isn't one of those things that can be incrementally fixed. Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better, that's why its so appealing imo.


I mean maybe if you're a small town and want to stay a small town. Large cities, should definitely drive most transportation away from personal vehicles/pods. Its simply a space/first principles issue [1]. The math seems 100x less scalable, simply because you hate being around other humans (in which case what are you doing in a big city anyway).

[1]: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7999510360_8e46299621_z....


I always see that image referenced and it's kind of BS. it assumes the buses are filled to the brim constantly but the cars only ever have 1 person it. It also doesn't take into account the transport to and from your door on both ends. It also doesn't consider the inefficiency in wait time.

The ideal transport would be a cocoon just big enough for you to fit in that picks you up at your door and gets you to your exact destination with minimal energy overhead. I'd argue a self driving car is much closer to that ideal and we can iterate our way much easier to it than public transit.


"It also doesn't take into account the transport to and from your door on both ends."

This type of design is terrible for average health outcomes [1]. We should not be optimizing for this. Walking to the bus stop is a good outcome. We should optimize for better more frequent bus routes, but "door-to-door" is unnecessary and counter-effectual.

The rest (iteration speed, filling a bus to the brim etc.) are just political problems just as intangible as "lets build better roads (public infrastructure) for autonomous cars", so we can put that aside.

[1]: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/us-neighborhood-wa...


we don't have to couple exercise with transport. We don't say planes are bad because it reduces the number of cross country hiking trips people take.

On filling a bus, I think its a fundamental shortcoming of having fixed routes that they'll never be as efficient as point to point transport, especially electrified transport. i'm not really making a political argument.


I agree with the second point but given as 80% of city transports post-covid is back to being fixed commutes along fixed routes, I'm happy optimizing that along transit ways. I don't really care what happens with the remaining 20%.

Right now, nearly 100% of travel is with "personal cocoons", totally unnecessary (other than for political reasons) and creating immense downward pressure on health and social outcomes. In terms of levers the government has on health and social outcomes, transitway design is a big one, and it should use it.

The fact that its done badly in America is a political problem, and if you have any political power it should be expended fixing that, not rolling back public transit.


I think if these cocoons costed $2.50 a trip you might think differently. I think driverless cars + some iteration on the vehicles themselves gets us there (without subsidies!).

People love the equity argument for public transit. Non personally owned, ubiquitous, driverless, cheap, efficient and most importantly convenient cocoons would increase equity a whole hell of a lot more than the traditional definition of public transit imo


For the 80% during peak rush hour? Just based on spatial efficiency that pricing doesn't seem attainable.

Maybe if you were to throw infinitely scalable roads in the way of Boring Tunnels, but now we are off in la-la wish land.

Just seems like a lot of work for what is a solved problem (atleast in the Pareto sense).


What is this solution we already have that you speak of? It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles in SF using public transit, between two popular destination pairs.

Fleets of driverless cars lets you do traffic shaping in time and space. Plus the marginal energy cost is basically nothing. It's basically all fixed cost BUT it's not like a transit project in the sense that you don't have to allocate a bunch of capital ahead of time and wait 10 years and then maybe get what you wanted (or not). Driverless cars are helpful the moment the first $200K car hits the road.


It takes 40 mins to go 3 miles using a car too at most peak times. It’s obviously not fair to compare a perfect autonomous transportation method with the current imperfect state of public transit.

As the population grows the driving times will get worse much faster than in transit because again, spatially, it just doesn’t scale well.

If you take 20-30% of everyone on a BART train and put em in autonomous cars with human drivers in the mix (like in the marginal $200K case tomorrow), what you have is abject chaos on the streets.

Every negative you mention about public transit is a political problem (ex: other first world countries can deliver public transit project in a matter of a 1-2 years and at a fraction of the cost).


no. i literally compared a common route on google maps for bus vs car, no transfers on the bus. car was 20 mins, bus was 40 mins when you factor in walking to the stop and waiting and walknig to your destination. to be fair, didn't consider time to get parking but its still less than 20 mins.

population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? we have very slow population growth and we can scale our way out of it with existing infra. more driverless cars = less parking = two more lanes on most streets. that can double throughput.

yes public transit is a huge political problem - so whats your solution? because the tech for public transit has existed forever so why isnt it better in the US? You cant just blame politics and then do nothing. You also cant say "we just need to advocate!" because, well, if it were that easy it would have already happened. Driverless cars are a good solution precisely because it uses existing infra and I think the political hurdle can be much much lower.


"population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? "

well then you can definitely put away your dreams of a magical $2.50 pod travel. You need people, more people, young people to build all that. And if we're saying flat and low population growth that dream is over, all conversation can stop.

But if we can turn things around on population, public transit is the only way things scale. Personal travel pods/cars are a current stopgap that only kind of works for our current population levels. Please re-measure car travel times at 5:30pm on a Wednesday evening when 80% of all trips happen, like I've mentioned, the remaining 20% are highly inconsequential to overall transportation design.


we already have working driverless pods.

you seem to think there are only 2 worlds: 1) population is exploding and everything has to scale 10x or 2) population isn't growing and apocalypse.

There is a 3rd outcome: slow, moderate growth at 2%/year and things need to scale just a little.


The ideal transport is be a bicycle, or an e-bike for cities with hills. The problem is that bike lanes are still not great. I bike commuted in SF for years. Bikes are ideal "last mile" transport too, for long commutes trains with bike carriages can be added in. Numerous cities in Europe show this works very well. Having said that, it's an ideal which I fear is probably far from reachable for most people given the way cities have been built, and infrastructure priorities in the US do not favour bikes.


I love biking and am excited by the possibility of the roads having more attentive and courteous Waymo cars and fewer speeding and drunk human drivers. (A man on bike was killed by a drunk speeding driver 24 hours ago 300 feet from my home.)


the bus doesn't have to be full to be a more efficient use of space than cars though. A typical (non-articulated) bus is the length two-three cars at most.

It is worth noting that personal vehicles are getting larger, so the amount of ridership required for a bus system to be more efficient than cars is only going down for the foreseeable future, even before getting into second order effects.


Worse, everyone in a car us tailgating. If you maintain a proper safe following distance cars do a lot worse.


yeah but it does have to have enough people for it to be efficient moving around that giant wall of metal


turns out that compared to lugging a living room around for every (average car occupancy of) 1.5 people on the road, a bus system has an extremely low efficiency bar to cross.


buses are roughly equivalent in energy per passenger mile vs cars when you consider average loads for each.


Pods are not the most efficient transport. It is simple geometry. Here is an expert in the field going into more detail. https://humantransit.org/2011/03/how-universal-is-transits-g... (read the rest of this site too - lots of good stuff there)


I don't see anything in that article that actually states efficient transport. It's just a long winded way of saying that there are a lot of factors in network design. kind of a useless article imo


Read it again and apply the geometry lessons to pods.


> Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better

Except for energy consumption. If we were in a world were fossil fuels were unlimited and climate change was not a thing, maybe I would agree with you.

But we are not. We need to get much more efficient with energy, and cars just can't do enough. Better accept it earlier than later and start building public transports wherever it's possible.


Trains near me are very polluting per passenger mile. The trains are empty most of the day and spew out visible clouds of diesel smoke. That doesn't even account for all the huge energy cost of building dedicated railways and hundreds of bridges and crossing signals.


I would suggest comparing electric trains to electric cars. And the solution to your problems sounds like they should improve the trains, not get everyone a car :-).


for city driving, electric vehicles are crazy efficient. the energy is negligble. basically all the driverless cars are EVs.


You do realize that the energy needed to move an object (say a car an its passenger) is related to the mass of the said object, right?

> the energy is negligble

What does that even mean?


yes i understand that. i mean its negligible in terms of cost relative to the cost of a trip (like a public transit fare).


Right. From my point of view, you answered to my comment about energy by saying "it's negligible", but you apparently meant "it's negligible in a metric different than the one of the post I am answering to, but I won't mention it". I think that's why I got confused :-).


That's an interesting claim, but have you got numbers to back it up, compared to bus networks which are also largely electric/hydrogen in most recent deployments?


Google says it costs roughly 4 cents a mile to charge a tesla model 3. Most city rides are a couple of miles so its a really really small fraction of the cost of trip cost (even if you price at public transit prices)


Can we talk about energy, and not price? And compare the consumption of a Tesla Model 3 with the average number of passengers (< 1.5?) versus the consumption of electric public transit?


Why? You can convert energy to cost and back - its all the same energy source for EVs vs public transit. Ultimately cost is what matters anyways.

Who cares if the energy requirement of public transit vs an EV has a huge delta (spoiler: there isn't a huge delta in terms of energy per passenger mile). They are both super low and efficient.


> Ultimately cost is what matters anyways.

To you, now. But the biggest problem of humankind right now is energy. Consequences of our use of energy are climate change and biodiversity loss. But even ignoring those consequences, we are going into a world where we will have dramatically less energy. Not in 100 years, in the next few decades. So you will live in that world.


That sounds like hell. More areas should be walkable and bikeable. Motorized vehicles should be limited to minimal areas so that the rest is quiet, safe and accessible. European cities have it right here - underground transport and quiet walkable surface level.


i like tunnels too. Just put cars in them that can easily transition to surface streets for door to door.

Bikeable/walkable cities are not an argument against quiet, cheap, ubiquitous, efficient driverless EVs.


Can you expand on that a little bit? What are the reasons that you believe that AVs are "not scalable at all?"


Regular cars aren't scalable at all. AVs are not any different than regular cars. In fact AV will increase the amount of cars on the road as more people that can currently not drive, such as children and the elderly, are now more likely to use a relatively low occupancy AV. So we can expect transit to get worse as AVs become prevalent.

The only scenario where AV may scale better than cars is if we're talking about autonomous buses, and that will only perform better if they are given the other features of public transit, such as dedicated lanes, which require set routes, and we're pretty much just talking about public transit in general at this point.


This picture makes it clear, for the most part. Public transit is a pareto improvement on personal driving pods in terms of scalability. Especially for fixed commute routes.

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7999510360_8e46299621_z....


How does the price of these compare to Uber/Lyft?


I'm in FiDi right now (weekday afternoon). A Waymo ride to Dolores Park is $18. UberX is $17. Lyft is $19.85.

I find that late night you often will not be able to get an Uber. I think drivers have been ceding ground to Waymo's obvious night driving superiority.


My experience has been that they are roughly equivalent in most cases. Sometimes they're slightly cheaper, multi-stop routes they tend to be a lot cheaper.

If you tip in Uber/Lyft, Waymo is always more price competitive.


More expensive


better driving imo


I expect to see one every few minutes in San Francisco. When I counted in August, 4 of 100 vehicles going past my house were self-driving (https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/16873429948135628... ). I don't recall the exact time period, but believe it was just under half an hour.


SF today is as close to Blade Runner that we'll ever get. Every billboard is for some AI company, you ride in a driverless cab across a literal mile of homeless people drugged out of their minds, screaming and pooping on the sidewalk. SF today is so aggressively dystopian that it's sort of hard not to enjoy the experience.


I think this comment is slightly exaggerated. I didn’t see that many ads for AI companies and while I did see some driverless vehicles, they were in the minority and I only saw them on my second full day exploring the city.

There are a large number of homeless people openly doing drugs, and there is some poop, but I find these descriptions to be generally inaccurate.

Don’t get me wrong, the situation is bad, but based on descriptions like this I was expecting far far worse.


That comment is just based on my experience going to SF a few weeks ago.

- Every billboard on the way to the hotel from the airport was for AI (which not the case a few months ago)

- Uber driver interrogated me all the way to the hotel on the value prop of my current project at work

- Went to grab a burger and had to dodge 2 people screaming at me, walked passed a man crying because I believe a friend had just gotten hit by a car.

- almost stepped in human fecies

- On my last night, took a cruise back to my hotel (thanks to a friend). Honestly it was quite fun.

Nothing in my comment was exaggerated, just edited a bit to make it more coherent. The reality was actually more dystopian.

And I do mean that last line seriously, I had a blast!:

> SF today is so aggressively dystopian that it's sort of hard not to enjoy the experience.


Nearly every billboard I've in SF, when I used to live near there 1-7 years ago, was tech. So not AI, but maybe "one app to rule them all" (I forget whose slogan that was).


> Are these autonomous vehicles so littered throughout California that you run into them weekly?

In SF yes. Even small amounts of driving in certain areas will have multiple daily interactions with these vehicles.


Where can I see videos (in the wild, not corporate) of this? I've never seen one in my life, though I'm in LA.


https://www.youtube.com/@JJRicks has almost 200 videos of his Waymo rides at this point, and has probably captured everything one could hope to see them do.


It is probably an odd thing to find because in SF they really are everywhere. I don't live in SF but visit a few times a year and after the first time I saw one they just sort of became part of the cityscape and not worth filming.


Well, Waymo is now giving rides in LA as part of a promotional tour. So you might be able to see one sooner than you think.

https://youtu.be/iNlS1LSDjl8?si=Me-zKKD7g0dPo6tH


In LA they're currently pretty active in the Santa Monica/Venice area (although rare enough that they get a lot of stares and photos... i felt like a celebrityon my rides). If you want to try it out there's some upcoming events where they'll give out a code for 1 week of free rides


I see them multiple times per day in the Alamo Square/Divisadero neighborhood in SF.


We're an active market in Phoenix for Waymo, and I live in Central Phoenix and see Waymos every single trip I take now; they're nearly ubiquitous. But I've also taken them several times. They're safe, very capable drivers, and I have a lot of confidence in them, to be honest.


They aren’t littered through CA, in CA they are exclusively in SF. In SF they are common and as they seem to drive nonstop, take more road time than a comparable number of normal cars.

They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.


Waymos do stop between fares. They've gotten grief from people who don't like them parked in front of their house.


I really hope if anything that seeing so many occupant-less vehicles on the streets makes us collectively realize how inefficiently these vehicles are using a scarce, congestion-prone resource in a way that wasn’t as visible with Uber/Lyft.

I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.


The city should just start to bill big fleet operators for passenger-less miles.

That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer.

By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.


Not the worst idea I’ve heard.


I feel this way about free parking.


Kinda surprised they stop... When you have a self-driving system that costs $200k+, you want to keep it running and collecting data as much as possible - passenger or no passenger.

The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.


It probably make sense to pre-position them to the spot most likely to reduce time to pick up the next predicted passenger.


probably more about stretching their battery than anything else. if it roams around between trips it's going to have fewer customers per charge cycle.


But when roaming around at like 10 mph average round the city, it can presumably do a full 18+ hour day on a single charge. Electric cars are super efficient in urban environments.


I never thought about the charging problem. In SF, where do Waymo cars charge themselves?


They have awaymo garage where a human manually plugs them in to charge.



It makes sense to me that people wouldn't want a surveillance machine from a hugely powerful adtech company loitering around their property.


In the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area I see Waymo, Nuro, and unmarked-but-we-all-know-it's-Apple autonomous vehicles quite frequently. A few times a week at least.

Cruise specifically operated in SF where I agree they have been a very common sight.