As a bike commuter, I share the road with Waymo often. When cycling, you're always checking the eyes of other drivers to confirm if they see you.
I've had a couple incidents where I was a little thrown/unnerved because I couldn't confirm if a Waymo was registering me. It ultimately behaved fine, but I had to put my guard way up because I just couldn't tell.
I've wondered if they could use the light/display on top to signal acknowledgment? How do you simulate the precision of a gaze with a machine that's "seeing" everything at once?
They have tried many variations out, but so far they don't seem to think they work better than doing nothing. The only communication the Waymo's currently do it to signal that they are stopping for pedestrians, both to the pedestrians themselves and also to the cars behind.
I don't know how aware Waymo cars are of their surroundings. Why don't they have a (or something like a) 360 degree string of LEDs (for example on the roof) that lights up a few in the direction of human obstacles if they're close enough? Bonus points if they're colored to indicate everything is ok or there's potential caution/danger.
They're still trying to do this weird universal signage when they need some way to replicate eye contact and 1-to-1 signaling. I feel safe biking or driving around other cars because I can directly communicate and negotiate with other traffic participants. I can't do that with an automated car as they're currently designed, and I feel like that's a huge flaw.
> I don't know how aware Waymo cars are of their surroundings.
Waymo cars are extremely, extremely aware of their surroundings. They have a category, distance, speed, and distribution of possible future paths for all cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists within sight over 360 degrees.
> Why don't they have a (or something like a) 360 degree string of LEDs (for example on the roof) that lights up a few in the direction of human obstacles if they're close enough?
I don't think it's so obvious this helps. What is the threshold for how far away something is before it's indicated on the ring? If I'm standing just outside that distance, how will I know it's because of distance rather than because I haven't been seen? If the distance is set long, how will I know it sees me and not something behind me?
The natural way to get around these problems is for the car to "point out" everything it see using, e.g., fake eyes. But now you have a car covered in eyes surveilling the neighborhood, and people don't like that either.
> What is the threshold for how far away something is before it's indicated on the ring? If I'm standing just outside that distance, how will I know it's because of distance rather than because I haven't been seen? If the distance is set long, how will I know it sees me and not something behind me?
I feel like this is a non-issue. The LEDs can be a certain size. They could be dimmable so their brightness can be modulated by distance.
All the things you mention are an issue with real drivers too, but we make it work because we can signal and communicate. Give these cars the same functionality and experiment. This isn't an insurmountable issue, but it is one that needs to be addressed that isn't being addressed at all. Throwing up your hands and saying it's too difficult is less than helpful. They're putting these things on the road with people. They have a responsibility to figure this stuff out. Especially if they want to go beyond a handful of cities.
Strong disagree that this is all non-issue/obvious. There are plenty of cases where it's better to not communicate rather than try and communicate in a way that is likely to be misinterpreted. Regarding your "just make the LEDs dimmable", this just adds more opportunities for confusion; humans will have no idea how the distance-brightness relationship is calibrated, it will appear different depending on the lighting conditions, etc. Just like consider how many gauges you have ever seen that communicate a continuous variable based on the brightness of the display. (Very few or none).
No one is throwing up their hands. Human-autonomous-vehicle communication is a whole research field. Waymo has every incentive here to both make the vehicles safer and to make pedestrians feel safer (holding actual safety fixed).
The ultimate test is not your first gut reaction as to whether they have done "enough", but rather it's whether the vehicles are safer than human-driven ones, and the evidence so far strongly points to that being the case.
Even if the cars had a "I'm currently deciding" indicator it would be a major improvement. My only issue with these sorts of anti-socialized services is not being able to promptly and easily sue for remedy. Maybe a blood price on a few mid-level managers (or possibly higher depending on the situation) if the service ends up killing people. That would put my heart at mind in the marketplace of the future.
Japanese already tested it, with googly eyes. It seems to work. Modern cars are expensive, some extra plastic and servos is not going to break the bank.
Going forward - I think it's important to not just categorically say all self driving cars are safer than human drivers. It's probably better to say I feel safer around Waymo and <insert other trusted company> self driving cars.
With such complexity and unknowns within the codebase - there is likely going to be a much higher amount of variability w.r.t. safety and AI decision making. I'm not so sure I'd categorically say a self driving car from say Nikola or some SPAC'd startup would make me feel all that safe.
I live right near Oracle Park where there was a big Cruise Yard, and there is a ton of traffic and cruise, zoox, etc self driving cars circling the neighborhood endlessly.
It's not as if I've had a overtly terrible single incident. It's as though they're causing unsafe driving conditions for pedestrians, cyclists and other motorists regularly.
Driving unreasonably slow and erratic, stopping in the middle of streets, blocking traffic, not responding to the need for them to move or respond as human driver would.
They're problematic. I could start a youtube channel or something it happens enough in my day to day life.
Seeing a bike and recognizing a bike are two different things with self driving cars. I like OP's idea of having a visual cue that it recognized a bike.
Assuming that they will eventually have displays around the sides to show ads, they could also use those to show nearby people who they see and how they plan to maneuver around them.
So if they are showing an ad on the display on your side it means that either it doesn’t see you or thinks you are far enough away that it does not have to account for you in its short term planning.
If it sees you and is taking you into account it could show a diagram showing you and what it plans to do.
If they will be running around with displays showing ads I'll never be without few rocks in my pocket just to keep things balanced and maintaining healthier society.
I know it sounds harsh, but force feeding me ads I definitely don't want to see while being unable to avoid them (stay home ain't no argument in civilized world) is unacceptable, and there is no but XYZ to make that stance any weaker.
Ads are a cancer of society, not the worst one but the core principle is rotten beyond reason - manipulate general population at your will, against their default choices, for money or power (or worse).
When I'm on a motorcycle, I assume they are never seeing me - but it's still useful to see them, and I can often tell what they are about to do before they've started doing it. I have not yet had the chance to share the road with a robot, but I wonder whether that feeling for traffic will still work.
It would be nice if there were a simple directional light on the top of robotaxis that indicates where it’s intending to go next (directional light) and how imminently it will begin moving (perhaps how fast the light blinks) when e.g. at a stop sign.
I don't think that's actually all that uncommon. I'll give them the benefit of doubt and assume that they habitually turn to look, but don't actually see or that they grossly misjudge your speed.
That was more of a problem in my 'Sturm & Drang' time. These days grannys on their electically-assisted bicycles are faster than me, hence I don't surprise car drivers any more.
since I'm out walking the dog often, in the dark and in daytime:
Often you can't tell if a human sees you. Even in day, they may have tinted windows, or the sun might make it impossible. At night, you definitely can't tell.
As a constant pedestrian, my main concern is people turning right at a light as I'm starting out in the crosswalk. In that case you can usually check their eyes from the side even at night. If I don't have confirmation they see me, or if they aren't obviously stopping for me, I don't go.
If it's someone at a 4-way stop, you can usually tell when they come to a stop far from back the crosswalk. Otherwise I don't walk out in front of them. I also try to be aware if I'm in their blind spot.
In the now defunct Apple Car, the windshield exterior was a giant OLED that rendered weird big eyes using the same code as on the Vision Pro. Apparently Johnny Ive insisted on this expensive external screen to make the car feel more human.
I agree that the UX could be better but it's definitely seeing you better than a human would. It can see you behind shit and around corners and in blind spots. Whether it reacts correctly is another story, but additionally, there's a strong incentive for Waymo not to hit you because of the regulatory regime. They have to report all collisions to a regulatory body and they have to send in all the data they had showing why they hit you. If they're at fault, you're almost certainly getting a big payout.
The cars could see you at one moment, and then not see you the next. They lack any good object permanence unlike humans, so I'm not sure surfacing this information would help.
Hell yeah. This is the best news I've read today. Waymo has completely replaced all usages of Uber for me whenever possible. Expanding the range makes me thrilled. Hopefully they're able to put more vehicles on the road, too, because wait times have been going up.
The app isn't updated yet, though. I wonder how long it'll take?
Does this mean they can go on the highways? If so that’s a significant upgrade to the Waymo service in the SF Bay Area, as it can now take you between towns.
They’ve always had approval to go up to 65 mph, but it was Waymo’s decision not to go on the highways. They’re starting to do it [1] and do a lot of freeway testing, so it might happen sooner.
Is there any underlying reason for the high traffic incident rate from the insurance company? Glendale seemed relatively safe when I was driving there.
i've struggled to get an uber for some early morning flights and can see it being easier to waymo to millbrae bart and connect to SFO than waiting a long time or paying insane surge prices for uber
You could also waymo to millbrae and uber to SFO. The price ($5.20) for BART to SFO makes it unattractive, especially since you often have to wait for a while. I've caltrained to millbrae and taken uber to SFO for $12, which is often worth the time tradeoff for me.
This changes the calculus for Google employees to live in SF and commute to Mountain View. They already run shuttle buses but with this, they can make it easier for their employees to commute at off hours by giving them priority for rides.
Waymo is awesome. Got to try it 3 months ago in Phoenix, love the whole experience. Amazing to see how the car deals with every trick thing that you find in traffic. Plus the Jaguar they use is a great car.
Fantastic news. I use them all the time in Phoenix. My mom uses them to get to her doctor appointments. I think people underestimate how much of a quality of life improvement these are for people even when compared to Uber/Lyft.
A recent Uber driver of mine encountered bay bridge traffic, said, "I know a shortcut!" and veered out of the line waiting to enter the bridge. Then, Uber Safety called my phone asking if everything was alright. Then, the driver realized he didn't know where I was trying to go, asked me, realized I needed to go to Oakland, and spent 10+ minutes going in a slow circle to get back to the line of traffic.
A few drives later, I had a group dinner reservation at a restaurant downtown. I'm not a big sports person and I didn't realize I was asking to go downtown on the Saturday before the Super Bowl. Uber told me I had to wait 4 minutes for pickup, but that turned into a 20+ minute wait as driver after driver canceled on me when they saw where I was asking to go. I had to text all of the guests and apologize for being late to my own reservation.
A few drives later, I had a long conversation with a gay driver who recently fled from Iraq because his sexual identity wasn't respected there. I'm a mid-thirties, single male. The first question the driver asked me when I got in the car was if I had a family. I said no. Then he asked if I had a girlfriend. I said no. Then he slowly engaged with me in conversation for 10 minutes trying to figure out if I was a potential date for him and had trouble understanding that while I fully supported his sexual identity that that didn't mean I was an opportunity for connection.
Last weekend, as I was espousing the benefits of Waymo to a friend, they called an Uber while we were heading down from a restaurant at the top of an elevator. When we got down to the bottom floor, he was dismayed. Someone else had gotten into the Uber, the driver didn't check names, and they were now travelling on his dime.
Surely it's not that hard to envision the scenarios in which an autonomous driver might be desirable?
This is misanthropic tech vision at its finest. I got a job recommendation from an Uber driver. My aunt (against TOS) built a private driver business based on her personality after driving Lyft from the airport. I had a great conversation with a Somalian driver who’s favorite music artist was Dolly Parton. Once a driver saved me from a hairy situation with an irate customer who was chasing me and throwing things, I tipped him $20 and we laughed about it—I was just happy to have someone to witness the crazy.
Not to mention the thousands of people who currently make a respectable living driving people around.
But maybe I’m just one of those extroverts who doesn’t mind being around people.
Great. I am happy you are satisfied with the quality of service you're given by human drivers. I would hope you would be equally happy with the increased enjoyment I experience from an automated driving experience.
We will have to agree to disagree on whether it's a beneficial change to society to disrupt human drivers with autonomous drivers. Personally, I found the argument that artists shouldn't be disrupted by AI much more defensible than saying drivers shouldn't be disrupted. It always seemed easy to look at previously disrupted jobs, like people getting up at 4AM to act as manual alarm clocks via peashooters on windows, and say yes, we should replace this simple act of labor with technology.
>But maybe I’m just one of those extroverts who doesn’t mind being around people.
Maybe. I had a very boring experience overall with mine. I wouldn't have noticed if they were replaced with bots. That could be my lack of extroversion (or maybe getting all introverts myself. Few gave a vibe of wanting to chat. Just a job, after all).
But for the short term, I'm paranoid right now about autonomous driving because it is far from technologically sound. Probably more sound than the average driver, but we know that we hold tech a lot more accountable than humans. humans hold liability in human issues, companies are liable for tech issues and have the money to spend to fight any issues that arise (as we can see in real time with Tesla).
>But maybe I’m just one of those extroverts who doesn’t mind being around people.
Maybe. Or you've just been "lucky" with the kinds of experiences you've had on Uber.
I've had some really annoying drivers, shitty drivers. People have reported assaults and some have ended up worse.
If this were a daily thing for people (which it could be in the future), I wouldn't want a 1on1 experience every day (twice a day) with a new driver each time, each with their own personalities, driving abilities, and needs at the moment. Forget that.
And how many people are killed by taxi or Uber drivers? Their stories matter too. If you're a pedestrian or cyclist you quickly realize how dangerous "professional" drivers are.
I really don't see how a human-centered driving company survives with something that is near fully automated and new "drivers" can just be ordered up from Stellantis or whomever, provisioned, and sent on the road. The scaling laws just don't match up.
I say "near fully automated" because there's loads of operations involved, including human remote fleet management for when cars get stuck. But even that doesn't scale linearly with the amount of automated vehicles on the road, whereas Uber will always be at least 1:1 human:car.
You're comparing costs now? The price for human powered uber's will always increase based on labor costs. The price to put an autonomous vehicle on the road and manage it will most likely decrease as more are deployed and Waymo gets better at operating them. Time will tell, but Uber will not last once Waymo gets good at scaling this stuff.
Only if it’s coded that way. And a profit-seeking org may not code it that way if the optimal solution (for them) is canceling and finding more lucrative passengers.
A profit seeking org wouldn't take the ride in the first place instead of repeatedly accepting and cancelling. Or it would simply increase the price because it implicitly knows the value.
> How will waymo help with something like the super bowl? It's going to be overcapacity too.
Ability to scale the amount of Waymo cars to an area is immensely easier than scaling the amount of Uber/Lyft drivers available and willing to go to said area.
Nope. Cars are expensive. Waymo won't keep a bunch of extras sitting around just so that they have reserve capacity to scale up service during unusually busy events. It's more profitable just to make customers wait, or ask them to pay a higher fare for priority service.
"Krafcik made the point, as some analysts predict autonomous vehicle technology will be too expensive to adopt en masse. Waymo uses LiDAR sensors in its vehicles, which previously retailed for as much as $75,000. In 2019, Krafcik signaled that its Honeycomb LiDAR units now cost around $7,500."
Let's say the Waymo cars are $1 million each, which is probably high, given than a fully loaded i-Pace is $80k, which still leaves $920,000 for Google/Waymo devices and software costs to get to $1 million. Given the estimate for a human life at $7.4 million[1], I think they are.
Labor cost pretty much always increases while the cost of research technology decreases once it encounters economies of scale.
A car today at the admittedly high cost estimate of $1M will “pay itself off” versus your labor estimate in less than 8 years. Humans don’t get paid off and then work for free afterwards.
A taxi doesn't have a lifespan of 8 years, and note that while I don't think that a Waymo car costs anything like $1M, it's also not actually the case that you pay taxi drivers $140k per year.
I see very little to suggest that a Waymo car costs less all-in over the course of about two years than a Prius and an Uber driver does, and that's the much more relevant comparison.
Nothing to say that this couldn't change in the future. But that's my guess for the status quo.
Take $40k* for TCO for a Prius for 5 years, plus $140k for the driver to get to $190k. Using $140k because that matches the availability of software that doesn't need sleep.
$190k - $80k for a jaguar ipace leaves $110k per vehicle for Waymo to work with, multiplied by the size of their fleet. How much do we want to figure a pile of sensors, computer hardware, and custom housings to cost? Minus insurance and electricity, which I don't know how much to figure and the answer is yeah I don't know. $110k over 2 years doesn't seem like that much, but multiplied across a sizable fleet it adds up. I'm sure they're scaling up as fast as they can.
> Stuff where I want to be surrounded by robots all my life.
I mean, if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? Even if yes, does it matter?
If we're just going to let the robots be the only thing we see all day long, why not just call it - hang up the hats build full AGI and blow up the humans.
I don't consider driving in traffic to be a pinnacle of human experience worthy of preservation. I certainly have concerns about AI automating away some jobs, but I thought stop-and-go city driving was something everyone could agree on as being worthwhile to eliminate.
>but I thought stop-and-go city driving was something everyone could agree on as being worthwhile to eliminate.
It's mixed. Driving is both a career and a pastime/hobby. I can certainly see a long term (30+ year) shift to AI driving being a hindrance to the latter, even if the efficiencies would be massive (e.g. there wouldn't be such thing as "stop and go city driving" to the extent of modern day driving. Stop and go is a product of inefficient human sensors and signalling).
As a career, yes. It probably won't exist in 20 years at this rate.
> couldn't we also just say "sorry I don't feel like chatting"
I’ve been hit on by a few Uber drivers. (Early thirties guy.) They stop talking then forget after two seconds. Unfortunately, the person who crosses the first boundary isn’t deterred by the second.
That said, I do appreciate the chutzpah of the driver who tried to invite himself to my date for a threesome.
I don’t need to be given a numeric rating by my chauffeur on how well I sit in the back of a car. The social play-acting part of ridesharing apps became exhausting to me (admittedly: an introvert) sometime during the first ride.
I agree. Not everything in life needs to be a personal interaction. I just want to get from A to B. One of the reasons I like an actually functioning mass transit system is that you just get on and get off. Subways don't rate people (yet) and that is something I think good regulation could enforce here too. The problem is we have a long history of bad regulation when it comes to mass transit so we will see.
Yeah, imagine losing your gmail account due to some automated system malfunctioning and simultaneously losing access to the transportation system you depend on.
I've used Waymo a couple of times now and absolutely find the experience superior.
As mentioned, the driving is sane... with other taxi and taxi-like services that can be hit or miss. But it's more than that.
When I get in taxi I can't help feel like I'm invading the driver's space in some way. The awkward conversations, the awkward silences, the music I'd never choose to listen to on my own, and that list goes on along similar lines; not to mention that many drivers feel like they have to engage in one way or another order to get a decent gratuity I feel more like I'm continuing to be "sold" something after the ride starts. It's just not pleasant.
In a Waymo, I don't feel any of that. I put something I want to listen to on the sound system or just enjoy the ride. Sure, I know there is staff somewhere watching me, but that doesn't bother me nearly so much as being in an incidental, albeit fleeting, social relationship with someone I might not otherwise chose to engage with.
So yes. A self-driving car is my first choice if my pickup/dropoff allows it.
It’s one of those experiences you didn’t realize you wanted until you have it.
- No need for chit chat, you can just work / talk on the phone / play music
- No 18-hour shift sweat and deodorant smell
- No cursing at other drivers or awkward apologies because of fear of a bad rating
- Smooth, predictable driving. I have yet to have a “holy shit” moment in a Waymo, but this happens regularly in Uber / Lyft.
Also on safety, about 50% of the population has to worry a lot more about being abducted/hit on/stalked/etc. Uber and Lyft know this and have gone to great lengths to recruit female drivers, set up safety hotlines, etc. Not having to worry about the driver is a big deal.
IDK, It just sounds like some people have bad experiences and is using negativity bias to justify early tech (and ofc a skewed audience who seems to abhor socialties). All my uber rides were boring and uneventful. I see no need to pay a premium to guarantee that.
Meanwhile the driving experience of autonomous drivers is still not at a satisfactory stage for me. Maybe it worked fine in SF, but LA has some pretty rough, unmaintained roads to navigate.
In my previous job I took 1000s of taxis all over Europe getting all kind of experience (including getting in an accident with a drunk taxi driver). Uber are an improvement that removed a lot of shady things but riding a Waymo in Phoenix is for me the best experience as there is almost no unknown.
> and ofc a skewed audience who seems to abhor socialties
At the same time every other story involves a horror over "going to dinner." They apparently don't abhor socialities, they just abhor having to be in the presence of the "lower caste."
Just the safe driving alone is a big improvement. Every time I get into an Uber, I hope and pray the driver isn’t aggressive and erratic. You always know what you’re going to get with a Waymo.
Plus, nice and clean Jaguar I-Pace vehicles. No person to talk to and no tipping.
Safety is the most important point across all customers. But as someone who is less concerned with safety, I still get enormous value out of Waymo. Let me try to explain:
Consider the distribution of Uber/Lyft drivers you have had. All the way from smooth driving, well-maintained car, through to erratic behavior and unpleasant environment. Imagine if the next time you got a driver you really like, you said "this driver only from now on" and that was the consistent experience you always got out of Uber/Lyft.
That is what Waymo is like. It is the same every time I get in. I do not have to think or adapt to a new environment. It is like sitting on my own couch at home.
That's because the cars are all brand new Jaguars that are impeccably maintained. If Waymo succeeds in becoming a widely used service that is price competitive with Uber, the experience won't be this good forever.
This fancy a vehicle? Maybe not, though I don't see why they wouldn't maintain a premium brand of some sort.
More importantly: the fleet is owned and maintained by Waymo. So they can achieve a higher degree of consistency. It is not the fanciness I value, it is the consistency.
Put another way: I can get a fancy car and a good driver with Uber Black. I would rate my waymo experience slightly above Uber Black.
Yeah, Uber used to just be what Uber Black is now, if you remember. I'm sure that both the consistency but moreso the average quality of Waymo will eventually decline (although the experience will of course always be more consistent than Uber). They aren't going to maintain a premium brand because they have billions of dollars of engineering costs that they need to amortize over the biggest possible pool of revenue.
Having a car to yourself is honestly just way better, maybe I'm just antisocial
Like I will easily pay a premium to have self-driving most of the time. I can play my music on the speakers, I can work more comfortably in the car, etc. etc.
Also, I find Uber drivers are pretty bad drivers often - comparative advantage
> Owning a car yourself is the most costly option, so I would hope that it is the “best.”
I drove a car into San Francisco once. Never again. Not having to worry about parking, being able to nap or work en route, not having to get stressed by traffic, etc. Massive improvement in QOL.
If you pay a lot for parking or don't use the car much this tracks. But if you have the volume, then owning a car is cheaper.
An affordable mid size car costs roughly $6k per year total cost for a new car, and about 2/3 that for a used car.
If you commute daily to work, that is 500 trips per year. Two weekend trips adds another 100 per year. Now we are talking about ~$10/trip if you own your car.
When you add the premium value you get from flexibility, then it's an even better deal. If you only drive 50x a year then yeah, just use services.
Really? do you want to see every little receipt from the GP?
I'll give a rough cost with my small sedan pre-pandemic
- Gas every 2 weeks (30 mile commute to work), fillin up the car is about $60. so $120 for gas. 120/month is 1440/year
- DMV costs are $150 a year
- car wash every few months. Let's make it monthly and more expensive than my actual washes. $50/month, 600 a year
- oil change every 3 months or so (probably less, but let's be conservative here). $70/quarter, 280/year.
- occasional repairs due to being an old car. sporadic, but let's throw in maybe $300 a year total.
- Finally, $100/month for insurance. $1200/Year.
so, ~4000/year. Given that that was a daily commute along with other short travel, it's cheaper than the idea of relying on taxis. Even if it was as cheap as $10/ride, it'd cost $4800/year to get to work alone. For my commute, it'd be more like $40-50/ride. Not even close.
ofc the rub here is that these are the costs for a paid off car, so if you don't own a car you need to factor in car payments, or the one time cost grabbing a used car. I grabbed my car for $5k before the car market (and every other market) went to hell, so it still very quickly paid for itself.
It's all down to miles per year, a new car should last 100k miles "without major repairs" and if you drive 10k miles a year (whatever, if it's more it's more in favor of the owner) a car should last at least 10 years.
A new car is $40k, a 10 year old car seems to go for about $10k, so say $3k a year. So with a brand new car, still getting "around" that $6-7k a year.
Or to put it another way - at some point it HAS to be cheaper to own, because someone owns the car that is driving you around!
How is an oil change every 3 months stupid? Every 3000 miles I get a change, and I had to commute a minimum of 70 miles a day. Comes out to 42 days per milestone, or 8-9 weeks if only counting weekdays. I felt like I always put it off and the math checks out.
My driving went way down during the pandemic, but it's probably a better normal metric to measure my routine before a global anamloly.
>600 a year on car washes?
I was being very generous there to prove a point. I don't do a car wash monthly and I don't get the highest tier of car wash either.
Even the "stupidest" spending on my car for daily travel and I don't come within a stone's throw of justifying taxis, financially speaking save on.
I think I last got an oil change early on during the pandemic.
Sometime around then.
I do think my car needs a car wash. Not necessarily this month, but definitely within the next year or so. It costs $5 in quarters at the car wash. Maybe $10. Not $600 a year.
If you are spending $600 a year on car washes, I want to start a business, and I want you, specifically you, as my customer.
It's pedantic to most, I'm sure. Just FYI, though, antisocial is to be opposed to society - like Timothy McVeigh. Asocial is probably what you're looking for.
You're not just being pedantic, you're also wrong [0][1][2][3]. Their usage is 100% standard and is encoded in every dictionary I can find, and etymonline lists it as the original definition dating back to 1797 [4], with "hostile to social order or norms" first recorded a few years later.
To be extra pedantic, I believe you meant Ted Kaczynski.
Timothy McVeigh was trying to make the US government pay for specific things it did to "his people"; Ted Kaczynski was lashing out at the industrialised world after living in isolation in his cabin in the woods.
- Safety: My gf much prefers to Uber/Lyft at night.
- Consistency: You know what you're getting.
- Privacy: Especially nice when traveling with a group.
- Instant pick-up estimate: It can take a while to find a driver with Uber/Lyft, and often the initial estimate is not fulfilled. While Waymo times are generally higher, you know before you press the button what the exact wait time will be.
Some of these will still happen, even in a self-driving car, because of prior passengers. In fact they might be more of a problem because passengers won't have another human in the car inhibiting their impolite or gross behavior.
I look forward to Snow Crash's self-cleaning public restrooms.
For now they are still just cars with no driver. Once they are fully trustworthy though, the interior of the car could be repurposed in some interesting ways. Take out all the driving controls, add a desk, move the climate/radio control to a central console, captains chairs. The possibilities are endless.
I've been thinking exactly along these lines myself. I bet a lot of people are thinking that self-driving + electric will bring van life to a whole new level. It may become the reality that a large number of people actually, purposefully, live in self driving vehicles/homes since removing the 'car' part greatly improves the living part.
You can check out the Hyundai Ioniq 7 for an idea of a non-conventional interior. Even then it still needs a driver's seat for the current day, so it can radicalize even further.
Though I'm not sure if we'll ever fully get to such a state. I can see driver's seats still being mandated in case of failure and a need to revert to manual driving.
If crash rates go down, and you have a flat surface that you’re strapped onto that is angled and has an airbag-like system to ensure as many G’s as eyeballs in or out, sure we could.
As far as my imagination goes any efficient seatbelts for a person lying down will be very painful in even a small incident if the passenger has a scrotum.
The big one: dealing with people, any people, sucks.
Nothing is better than being able to go about your business without have to worry about social niceties and endless other tedious things associated with human beings.
It makes me super anxious when drivers run stop signs, drive in the shoulder, or perform other maneuvers that I'd never perform while driving myself. Knowing I'm in a car with no risk of an accident due to knowingly breaking the law would bring me a great deal of peace.
Not having to tip. Having the car take a sensible route and not some idiotic detour Waze thought was clever. Having a car that’s always paying attention instead of being on a perpetual phone call. Being able to make phone calls without feeling obnoxious or worrying about one’s rating. Being in an objectively safer ride. Not having to listen to a rant about how the angel Mohamed saw was actually a demon because he was scared or get given a sermon about why being gay is evil. Not having drivers cancel on you because they don’t want to go where you need to.
When i was in florida at Orlando, my wife and i experienced several of the worst Uber/Lyft drivers i can imagine. We're talking regularly breaking the law while driving, drivers. My wife also regularly encounters drivers she is uncomfortable around.
In general i'd vastly prefer a non-human experience.
Private transit*. Uber and Waymo are private transit.
Something to note is that actual public transit (buses and trains) has something like 10x fewer annual deaths than private vehicles, because fatal accidents almost never happen in them.
Personal safety is a much less statistically relevant concern compared to personal injury.
The fundamental problem with public transit in most of the US that has it is that it's not the best option. And when it's not the best option, you get a selection bias towards passengers that most passengers wouldn't want to ride with. Which encourages more people to take other options. Rinse repeat.
I like BART. It's actually really convenient, connecting where I live, where I work, and where a bunch of my friends live. Unfortunately, I have a negative experience upwards of half the time I ride it. Sometimes, it's minor, just some person talking nonsense to themselves in the corner. Whatever, puts me on edge because I lose confidence that this person won't transgress social norms in more extreme ways, but I can live with it. Sometimes the entire car smells like a latrine. Sometimes it's a dude laying across the aisle pleasuring himself. Also not going to kill me, but also is something I'd rather avoid, and absolutely can by not riding public transit.
Uber, by contrast, I only have to worry about the driver making me uncomfortable, and that's relatively rare. Maybe 1 in 10 rides will involve a driver either driving like a maniac, or reeking of BO.
With Waymo, there are none of those issues. Hop in a vehicle, it's clean, it drives safely, and there's no naked lunatics.
Waymo has still not proven to be as safe as a public bus. It can get into a crash just like any other vehicle. It can (e.g.) be hit by a drunk driver in ways that are likely to be much more injurious to the passengers than if the same situation happened to a bus. Buses have far more inertia than the vehicles around them, they're more visible, and they are driven by professional, trained drivers. Waymo has not provided enough specific data that points to their vehicles being safer than public transit or their driving skill outperforming a trained professional driver (not just a random person with a license off the street like Uber uses). I'm skeptical considering how death rates are a full 10X lower on public transit compared to automobiles. Even if Waymo is twice as safe as a human-operated automobile, that still makes it 5x less safe than public transit.
Most of this country is a sprawling mess that does not lend itself to traditional mass transit options. Yet those same spaces have an abundance of well-maintained roads. At a certain point we need to accept we are not Europe and we need transit solution suited to our multi-trillion dollar pre-built infrastructure. Self-driving cars are likely to be a big part of that.
Yeah, but public transit is socialist and helps the poor and minorities so we can't have that in the states beyond the massive cities that more or less force the issue.
The distinction is absolutely important between public and private transit. However to most folks they'll be the same thing in the end. Maybe local governments can buy cars for private public transit, which could be nice depending on funding and all that.
Are the concerns rooted in statistical fact or just fear? Most people in the United States basically can’t imagine an alternative to car-first infrastructure.
If somebody is too afraid to ride the bus because they think they'll get raped, does the facts really matter? Or their feelings of physical insecurity?
>If somebody is too afraid to ride the bus because they think they'll get raped, does the facts really matter?
on a micro level, no. On a macro level, yes. People have individual fears, but those individual fears shouldn't influence the decision of multi billion dollar transport budgets. As cold as it sounds, injury or harm is built into the costs of such transportation.
With all that said, LA has indeed gotten much less safe, and public transportation has never really been "good", per se. On a micro level, I literally could not get within 2 miles of work from bus schedules one way, and 5 miles the other after work (back when work was in town). It wasted enough time that it would have been worth considering biking 15 miles a day instead of using a bus. If I wasn't in such poor shape it'd take almost the same time (which was double my driving commute).
> Something to note is that actual public transit (buses and trains) has something like 10x fewer annual deaths than private vehicles, because fatal accidents almost never happen in them.
I've never had a fent zombie wave a knife in my face on private transit, but it has happened a couple of times on public transit. I get that it is technically "safer", but we have a long way to go before normal people will feel safe on it (in the states, other countries obviously do this better by not allowing their buses and light rail to be turned into roving day centers).
Did you get injured or die? 30,000 people die of car crashes every year, about half resulting from a much more common and legal drug.
How many people die of assaults on public transit every year? I’ll let you look that one up.
Fear isn’t the same as risk. Lots of people are afraid of planes. Not a single passenger died of as a result of a commercial airline incident last year in the United States.
That article also lists out recent violence on public transit in my city (like the guy hitting people with a hammer on the train). In comparison, 36 people were killed in car crashes in 2022, 28 in 2023.
I'm not saying that it wasn't dangerous, I'm saying that the statistical probability of the situation you were in happening and resulting in an injury or death is lower than the probability of injury or death in a motor vehicle.
You might feel like you have more control over your fate when you're driving, but as the say in the deep bowels American political culture, "facts don't care about your feelings." The same factually-incorrect risk evaluation is used by people who prefer driving over flying on a commercial airliner.
31% of all fatal crashes in 2021 involved drunk drivers, a much more common drug which is 100% legal. You don't have control over your fate in a car when other drivers on the road make up all of the moving objects that you can run into.
Not to mention the fact that crime can still happen to you while you are driving, a common example being carjacking. [1]
Your own numbers that you provided tell us the opposite story that you want to tell. The very first transit death this year just happened almost 3 months into the year. Meanwhile, 28-36 yearly car crash deaths in Seattle averages out to over 2 deaths every single month. That means by the time someone died on transit, something like 6 people had already died in car crashes in the Seattle area.
Obviously, more people are driving than taking transit, but still, in Seattle almost half of all trips downtown involve public transit.
Most DUI crashes happen at night, when public transportation is going to be even less useful, and Uber/waymo are important in making things better. Carjackings don’t happen here, although they do happen south of here (a poor girl got shot dead in tukwila a few weeks ago). KiaBoyz are a problem, especially with our non pursuit law (the girl was killed by kids who were let go by Seattle police earlier in the day because they couldn’t chase them).
I always take transit downtown despite the risks, it’s just too convenient, but that’s just occasionally. My wife takes it also, a lot more, and it’s a completely different fear factor for a woman traveling alone. However, that’s all we really use it for, for anything else we drive. This is in contrast to my experience living outside the states, where I could actually live without a car.
All of transit’s safety issues are actually preventable by just being more strict about what people can get away with on buses (eg no smoking fent on the bus) and enforcing fares (not for the revenue, but people who don’t pay fares are more likely to cause other problems). I’m pretty sure if anyone tried these things in Lausanne, multiple swat teams would be on them quickly (heck, I’ve seen that happen for just not paying fares, don’t mess with Swiss police or even Swiss transit police). If Seattle wants us to use transit more, they need to take safety more seriously. Other countries do that, they get better results. Otherwise, we will lean more heavily on private transit like Waymo.
Some of my most terrifying moments in life have been in cars on the road. I've had a few dicey moments on public transit, which I use constantly, but nothing as truly life-threatening as the near misses I've experienced on the freeway.
All of my scary moments in a car were on long road trips where public transit doesn't really apply, and with pedestrians walking out in front of my car on green lights (probably fent related also).
I think the "improvement" is that it ought to be cheaper. Whether it actually is remains to be seen.
Some people, like his mother, can't drive anymore. They might be encouraged to stay in the homes they're used to, instead of moving to assisted living.
I can't even buy fruit from a certain grocery store because some kid there must were cologne. The fruit absolutely reeks of it.
Waymo cars will be no different. All it takes is one Armenian guy visiting Glendale slathered in cologne to nuke one of those cars permanently for all time.
I was about to ask the same thing; I have a hard time seeing the ways it ends up a net gain when driving is still a decent job for a lot of people, and rideshare drivers keep to themselves anyways
You might find it easier to understand if you had lost a friend or loved-one in a car accident.
Society will have to adapt to the advancements in AI and robotics.
The status quo is not a good option because (globally) cars cause over a million fatalities each year and over 20 million injuries. Driving, riding, or walking near vehicles is one of the most dangerous activities in modern life.
An extremely high percentage of deaths and injuries will be prevented as self-driving cars are deployed, since almost all accidents are due to human error.
A car that can drive itself will always be the better option to the companies that can afford the market share. Nobody cares about how automation will remove jobs for folks. These things are important to note. Your opinion as a customer is secondary to the cost to the provider.
I feel like no one in this thread lives in LA. This is going to be an absolute catastrophe. Driving out here is like Thunderdome. There is zero way in hell I'd ever trust some Waymo car to make some insane left turn across 6 lanes of rush hour traffic out here, let alone the freeway.
> There is zero way in hell I'd ever trust some Waymo car to make some insane left turn across 6 lanes of rush hour traffic out here, let alone the freeway.
This quote highlights why I would trust it more. I have been an Uber that essentially tried to make that turn, and it was insane. I'm hoping Waymo would be smart enough to try alternate routes (that said, I've had Google Maps route me in West Hollywood going across major boulevards without a light during rush hour, which is basically impossible).
I've taken Waymo in LA and Santa Monica and honestly it's fine. Some drivers freak out because it actually stops at stop signs and it doesn't speed, but it feels much safer than 90% of Ubers I've taken.
The cars also has much better depth perception than I do, which makes it pretty good at those unprotected left turns
One step at a time. Computers are already better than humans in terms of braking with ABS brakes. Driving in awful weather conditions is just a matter of sensors - as a human I can't see in the dark, but IR sensors can. Same for snow. Something with radar on different frequencies than visible light can see through snow and do better than humans can.
As someone who doesn’t live in LA: I can’t imagine what your freeways are like given your characterisation of an ordinary road. Our “freeways” max out at 4-5 lanes each way. From what I can tell, getting from A to B is a stressful full time job for the people of your good city.
I speak to VCs quite a bit and recently I was hanging around with a bunch of them, they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid industry, will never work, whatever.
But to me it's strange, if you go to San Francisco today you can see cars driving around with nobody inside. They drive around, they pick people up, they mostly don't crash into shit. There's nobody behind the wheel. I know that everyone is incredibly quick to point out their flaws and relative safety rating and remote interventions and so on but can we just take a step back, even for a moment, and acknowledge that they freaking did it, they basically did the thing that a lot of people said would never happen - the car drives around all day with nobody inside, of it's own volition!! It's amazing! Am I a deranged silicon valley optimist for thinking this?
I agree that there's still endless work to do, some companies are probably behaving in a way that is dangerous, they aren't half as good as you want them to be, it's not clear whether they are good for society or financially viable etc. etc. but it just seems weird that so few people are willing to be like, "fair play, they basically pulled it off, round of applause", even just for a second.
The only real reason that would make sense to me is if this is actually just a giant fraud and they are driving the things over LTE/4G a much larger fraction of the time than I have been led to believe. Anyone know the realistic ratio of self-driving to remote control? The fact that the safety statistics are 100X worse or whatever is obviously deadly serious but on a scale of six or so orders of magnitude it remains meaningfully impressive to my dumb brain.
> I agree that there's still endless work to do, some companies are probably behaving in a way that is dangerous, they aren't half as good as you want them to be, it's not clear whether they are good for society or financially viable etc. etc. but it just seems weird that so few people are willing to be like, "fair play, they basically pulled it off, round of applause", even just for a second.
They're victim of the self-driving hype machine, which is not entirely Waymo's fault. Lots of people and companies were really promising the world with self-driving cars after making the initial "novelty" proof of concept stuff possible. But now they're in the nitty gritty of actually making it safe, dependable, reliable, and trusted, in less than ideal conditions (or in non sunny California conditions at all) and people and companies are finding that it's far harder to follow through on that.
To Waymo's credit, they have been steadily plugging along without crazy marketing or PR to overhype their product. They just have to win the long-game, if they can.
Having lived in SF and elsewhere, even heavy SF rain is nothing compared to further up the West coast. I remember parts of the infra in SF failing when it rained more than one inch.
> they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid industry, will never work, whatever.
As Sinclair said, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something on which his salary depends on him not understanding."
The road to self driving cars is a capital intensive and entrenched in regulatory quagmire. Those two things are enough to keep VCs away.
But if you think about it, every trip that someone takes in a self-driving vehicle is a trip that they didn't take their own car or a taxi. Most trips are not complex, and most problems are with other human drivers. As the market grows the difficulty of the problem domain will shrink. If you can reach critical mass, infrastructure can be adjusted to specialize for self-driving cars.
That said, the illusion of self driving cars is that you can provide mass transit at affordable prices using existing infrastructure and specialized hubs/depots/fuel/roads for the vehicles. But we already have that, they're called busses. But busses are for poor people, so we don't invest in them.
This is incredible news. In the next 10 years more and more transportation will shift to self driving and save thousands of lives and prevent many more injuries. Already in San Francisco waymo's are and feel much safer than human driven rideshare.
I made a similar observation just yesterday. SAE level 5 will reset our current understanding of parenting to where it was 30 years ago. Groups of children will be able to safely travel around town without adult supervision.
While autonomous driving helps a bit on safety, that's just one of the many issues with the car dependence in our society. It might even expand the issues, if it ends up with less people using public transport and relying on these kinds of things.
Waymo is public transport, but you mean mass transit.
People don't use mass transit because it sucks, blaming other modes of public transit doesn't cut it. The design and implementation of it is what keeps people from using it.
The good news is automated vehicles will add flexible options for new types of public transport that are between single-trip taxies and mass transit and will lower costs to all kinds of public transit.
European and Asian nations tend to have perfectly usable mass transit (including developing countries). Sure there are some us cases for cars, but for daily commute its not needed.
To add to it mass transit is generally heavuly subsidized that means that less well off people can get to work/school at low costs. It reduces poverty and income inequality.
Mass transit is great when it's available, which means in places of high density, which is why you list Asia and Europe. It's right there in the name.
I live in Europe in a village of about 1500 people are there is no usable public transport (2 buses a day).
Relative to total area, mass transit is almost nowhere. That's also true for for total road kilometers.
I agree with your last sentence, but for those who live outside of cities or other places of high density, public transport is unusable or unavailable. Governments roundly ignore people who live in these places (due to expense and political irrelevance) so there is always a fairly decent percentage of the population that is "public transport poor".
>I live in Europe in a village of about 1500 people are there is no usable public transport (2 buses a day).
and how would waymo fix this? Waymo is still a private business and needs to weigh the costs of deploying to a smaller town vs. simply not supporting that range. It's the same issue as government.
Automated vehicles will enable smaller buses that drive themselves and make serving these places profitable to service. Automated taxi services like Waymo also ultimately be cheaper too.
Nah bro, they would instead send those cars where they would get much more profit. You just can't expect too many cab bookings in a small town of 1500.
Idk bout EU but here in India we have public transport to even remote places and it is sure profitable and many people do use it everyday, even if the population is less many use public transit instead of own veichles in towns.
I don't know. One "problem" is the salary around here. You simply cannot generate enough revenue from anything below 30k people for anything more than school buses (which are both predictable and tax-funded). But you wouldn't need that many rides to justify a taxi. Those _are_ around, even though typically you need to call well in advance. So even if there is like one of those autonomous taxis for a dozen 1.5k villages that will probably be both enough for any reasonable situation and an improvement wrt to the current state
Subsidizing public transit to make it affordable is a terrible idea. If you want good public transit with stable funding, you must build it primarily for the middle class. For people who pay more taxes than they receive benefits and who could choose to drive instead.
Driving has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. If you have a car anyway, using it for yet another trip is cheap. If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes. But why would you do that? Because once a city grows large enough and dense enough, public transit becomes cheaper than car infrastructure. Because it requires less subsidies than driving.
>For people who pay more taxes than they receive benefits and who could choose to drive instead.
that doesn't make sense. You just described the issue: they can choose to drive. And many do in the US.
Government subsidizes transport to get more people into the city hubs, which bolsters the economy of business as more people can reach downtown, which gives the town/city more money in taxes. These business have fixed costs so it's not like a rich person is going to be proportionately better to business than a poor person buying the bare necessities.
It makes a lot more sense to target people who are taken out of the economy pool otherwise without such transportation. Especially if we're talking about a large city like LA.
----
and while it's a cliche, it needs to be asked in this context: what even is "middle class" here?
>If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes.
I argue that such a "low enough bar" for a state like California will never outdo the convenience of a car. You're right in the long term that less cars => lower road maintenance => less road subsidies => more money to go around to other parts of the state. But we're not starting from scratch here.
Public services used by people who can afford the alternatives are universally better than those intended for the poor. If you don't use the service yourself, you don't care that much about the quality, and you are more likely to support funding cuts. Because the poor are a minority, most people don't really care about services used by them.
>If you don't use the service yourself, you don't care that much about the quality, and you are more likely to support funding cuts.
If you don't use the service it doesn't matter if it's a hunk of junk or a limousine, it's your tax money for a service you don't care about and will cut it anyway. You may be more likely to cut a limousine if you don't personally use it.
>Because the poor are a minority, most people don't really care about services used by them.
I don't know about minority, especially in these times. But minority or not, welfare programs take up 20% or so of government spending. It's a large enough population being serviced that it can't be ignored.
Waymo is not public transport in the sense that most people mean it, which describes only state entities, as opposed to the private sector. Public transit exists to serve the public good, doesn't need to turn a profit, and is accountable to government (ideally elected) officials. Waymo is a for-profit entity that can do more or less whatever it wants within the bounds set by CPUC. I think it's a net good, but it's still private industry.
Is it? Doesn't "public transit" at least somewhat imply that it's a business that has to operate under the rules of some democratically elected institution?
Waymo will ban you, price you differently based on who/where/when you are, etc. I wouldn't expect any of that from "public transit".
Yes, it's public transit. Public doesn't mean "there aren't any rules" it just means public. You can't light barbecues in my local public park, and the bloke who tried to knife a bus driver isn't allowed to ride the public buses here.
>Public transportation service means the operation of a vehicle that provides general or special service to the public on a regular and continuing basis consistent with 49 U.S.C. Chapter 53.
>(A) means regular, continuing shared-ride surface transportation services that are open to the general public or open to a segment of the general public defined by age, disability, or low income; and
in a legal sense, Waymo doesn't seem to meet even these high level definitions. So it's likely classified as private transportation unless I'm missing something.
That's a different kind of price segmentation than the kind of price discrimination that these companies can do. Also even without discounts public transit is substantially cheaper than taxi services (like 1/10th the cost). Some arguments I've seen is that the city should just make public transit free as you can offset the hit by getting rid of fare enforcement / fare machines.
I hate the comparisons to Europe, because they're apples to oranges. I've been in European cities and I totally agree, it's a joy to be able to take public transit and/or walk everywhere. But most European cities were built long before the car.
Older US cities (Boston, NY) have great public transit/walking options, though I agree deferred maintenance is taking its toll. But if you look at cities designed around the car, for many of them it's just prohibitively expensive to add things like light rail or subways now. Austin TX will be adding more light rail, but the price tag keeps exploding and the route keeps getting shorter.
I'd be curious if anyone could point to any city that was built around the car where they subsequently made substantial public transit improvements that carry more than, say, 10% of commuters.
US cities love their cars. Not even in city centers do they prioritize pedestrians over cars. That has nothing to do with apples or oranges. It's a priority thing and not costs. There is no reason to need cars in city centers. Makes cities ugly, loud and dangerous compared to europe or asia.
Almost everything where people ask for "more funding", that service is junk and adding money just means you go from getting junk for cheap to getting junk for expensive. I've seen zero cases of it going from junk to even mediocre. I've seen numerous examples of junk going from cheap junk to expensive junk, especially in US public services.
The "more funding" is always allocated towards existing rent-seekers.
And my opinion with getting junk is that if I'm getting it, I want to be paying as little for it as possible.
As a quick test for what you feel, try this. You read a headline that says "This city school received the most government funding of any school in the US". Do you think that school is "great" / "mediocre" / "crap"? My personal immediate inclination is that the school is probably shit.
It's not an either-or situation, one helps the others.
AVs more or less solve the last-mile problem with public transportation - if you don't live on a transit route, or the one you live near is infrequent, taking it can be infeasible.
But also, it directly helps one of the major pain points of transit logistics - you cannot effectively respond to demand by scaling up/down the size and quantity of busses when you have human drivers that expect to have regular routes and regular hours. In contrast, you can have a whole fleet of electric short/medium/large busses which spend most of their time idling at the charge stations (which reduces maintenance costs) and go in and out of service as the daily traffic demands it, even pre-emptively going to a destination hub during off-peak times to await peak one-way demand (e.g. busses going to loiter downtown at 3/4ish to wait for all the businesspeople going back to the suburbs)
Ya, smaller door to transit center transportation is something we can even begin to consider once autonomous driving works. Like how old retired PLA soldiers used to drive tuktuks from Beijing subway stations to your apartment in the 1990s for a 5 mao or one kuai.
If you open Uber and the app says a car is 9 minutes away that’s really anywhere from 5 to 15.
With Waymo if they say it’s 9 minutes to get a ride they mean 9 minutes. They’re not waiting for a human to accept your ride, they’re scheduling resources.
The lack of variance makes delays much more tolerable, IMO.
I was very bummed on a recent trip to SF to find there was a waitlist for Waymo and I couldn't use the service! But I've since been 'accepted' so my next West Coast trip I'll definitely be taking a driverless car. I was a long time SF resident so I'll use my local knowledge to choose the most ratchet route possible.
The potential for self-driving cars to bring down the cost of rides is very exciting to me. I've been carless for decades and though I'm a huge proponent and user of mass transit, we have to be realistic. Most of this country is exceptionally ill-suited to mass transit and is custom-built for car traffic.
It is still a fun novelty mode of ride with limited supply and is priced accordingly and is not a mass transport option yet. Once the supply of cars rises the prices will fall to establish a new equilibrium hopefully much lower than Uber.
Let's simplify this. Do you think there is a long term incentive for Waymo to not maximize utilization of waymo cars by pricing "correctly" (based on supply, demand and costs)?
I don't know about bringing down costs. The amount of money that's been invested in this wants to get paid back, so they're gonna be charging as money they can for this to be worth it.
As long as there is competition the prices will be low (eventually). Labor is almost always the most expensive part of any service and these technologies reduce the need for labor considerably.
That's only true if there's competition with similar costs, though. Uber and Lyft can't reduce prices without collapsing, so Waymo has no incentive to charge anything less than what they charge minus one cent and they'll have all the demand they can handle.
> amount of money that's been invested in this wants to get paid back, so they're gonna be charging as money they can
As they should be. They’re currently competing with Uber and Lyft, and charging a novelty/quality premium. There will be a halcyon period as they scale and print money, but others will notice and start fighting that monopoly.
If apple spent 10B on their car, I wouldn't be surprised if Waymo spent 50 or 100 over 15 years and they invented the modern robotaxi. I think they've earned the ability to charge whatever they like. I'd also happily pay more than Uber rides whenever it comes to my area. Riding a couple in Arizona was amazing.
That's the value-sell of self-driving cars: placating an anti-social techno-"patrician" class that fears people, a class who now has the luxury of avoiding them.
Self-driving cars seem to be a technological solution to a modern socio-cultural pathology, nothing more. That's not healthy. Seems like the better solution would be to address the pathology directly and eliminate it, rather than create workarounds for it.
How did you find yourself in a low-trust society, with anti-social leanings? And how can we fix that? That needs to be addressed.
I dont think you can create a high trust society deliberately; It takes multi-generation level time-spans, and in a low trust environment there is no mechanism to guarantee your plans will be carried forward; even if you currently have dictator level control over society.
Creating highly trustworthy technology is the best we can do, and reliable transportation is a big part of this.
I also suspect targeting and removing the worst interactions people have with strangers (and for many this is the random nature of a human driver, either from a taxi or other drivers) would create a higher trust society overall, as there is less cause to be wary.
Just yesterday, walking in the inner sunset neighborhood of SF, I saw an old lady in a 1980s Volvo come to a 4-way stop. She looked really old, as in probably even 90+. She wasn't sure about the rules of the stop sign: she came to the stop and was hesitating to go. Other cars were waiting for her and some of them started just going through, creating a very dangerous situation. Eventually she mustered the courage to just make her turn. That made me think: her life would be so much easier if she didn't have to drive at all to go run her errands. She was creating an unsafe situation for everyone, not just herself.
The City (SF) has a fleet of transport vehicles that transport Seniors (old folks) around town. It would be much more cost effective to just have a bunch of Waymos available to Seniors.
"The City (SF) has a fleet of transport vehicles that transport Seniors (old folks) around town. It would be much more cost effective to just have a bunch of Waymos available to Seniors."
this is what I meant.
The drivers of the fleet of transport vehicles are helping old folks in and out of the vehicles, which you wouldn't get with a waymo
If Waymo was not too expensive and easy to get at rush hour in LA I'd certainly consider it. If I want to leave work between 5:30 and 6:30 pm, my commute can be 60 mins. At 8pm it will be 20 mins. That sucks but if I could use the 60 mins then it sucks less.
On the other hand, unlike Uber/Lyft, Waymo can't scale like they do. For them, demand pricing means more drivers with their own car driving when there's lots of people to pick up. For Waymo, they'd go broke trying to have enough cars for high demand times that would all sit idle (and have to drive somewhere to park) off peak.
Taking it up a notch. I'd be nice to redesign cars that have no driver. A bench, a desk, small buses for shared rides, or something.
they are usually couple of dollars more (for $20 range rides) but I think their demand supply is so skewed that it surges almost all the time it feels like
The driving is extremely smooth in general --- much smoother than many taxi journeys I've taken in that past.
I found myself in a corner case recently, with an illegally parked car blocking the street, we got partially round, blocked by another vehicle and then a fire engine with sirens approached from behind, the waymo handled it excellently!
I don’t know why people are excited. Whether it’s self driving or driven by a meat bag, it just means one more car on the road. One more car sitting in a parking lot/street/parking garage or driving around aimlessly until it gets assigned.
Instead of helping to alleviate traffic. TNCs were shown to actually increase traffic in urban areas [1]. I expect this won’t be any different with “self driving” vehicles.
It's cheaper than Uber if you're the type of person to tip your Uber driver 20%. Very infrequently it's cheaper without tip, but usually it's a bit more expensive.
Crucially, it doesn't care if you ask it to drive into heavy traffic. I'm so over Uber giving me an estimated time for pickup, having the driver get within range to learn additional details about the trip, then cancelling on me because it doesn't fit their desires. I was late to a reservation a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to go downtown during Superbowl Weekend and an estimated 3 minute pickup morphed into a ~20 minute delay as I waited for an Uber driver to commit to the drive.
> I'm so over Uber giving me an estimated time for pickup, having the driver get within range to learn additional details about the trip, then cancelling on me because it doesn't fit their desires.
I remember waiting for a Lyft that was perpetually 8 minutes away, because driver after driver canceled the ride when they saw the destination and presumably didn't want to drive that far. After about 9 or so cancelations and about 45 minutes, I finally got a pickup. Not having to deal with that shit is worth a few extra bucks to me.
It's certainly going up in price as people get off the waitlist and the number of vehicles allowed in service stays fixed. I'm optimistic, though. I would travel a lot more if the price was cheaper, I assume Waymo has enough data to realize that, and they will act in a way that creates a larger market, rather than squeezing the existing market, once they have the legal ability to do so.
They don't really need to decrease in price so much as not increase in price. Human labor keeps getting more expensive while the tech is probably getting cheaper, if they are just competing with Uber/Lyft, they can wait this out. On the other hand, they could definitely grow the market for taxi-like services like Uber did when it initially came out, but without unsustainable VC subsidies.
I've tried them about three months ago. They're a good experience, but maybe slightly worse pickup/dropoff than an Uber, and no less expensive, so they're kinda more "fun to have done once," than anything else.
In SF, up-front prices have been comparable to Uber’s, except that you don’t have to pay tip, which automatically makes it 15–20% cheaper.
The few times I’ve tried it, the service has been good and its driving was safe. The only downside is that there seems to sometimes be longer wait times.
Legally, it’s not compulsory. Socially and culturally, it definitely is. In the US, if you don’t tip 15%, you’re either an asshole, or you’re saying there’s severe issues with the service.
I’m not going justify this culture—I don’t like it either—but that is the way it is.
I'm in the US and a frequent Uber users, and I've only tipped once over 10 years. My rating is 4.93, so I don't think the drivers see me as an asshole.
It is possible there exists a table called dbo.user_ratings with a boolean column called IsAsshole, and you might have tons of rows there all with a 1 on the boolean column but the Uber APIs don't return that value. CEO Travis could tell us if it exists
I have friends who tip and tbh when I don't get a ride, they don't get a ride and when they get a ride, I get a ride. So obviously the tipping means nothing.
Occasionally I might tip, but only if I got something out of it. And it's rare. I think I might have tipped on 10 out of the 1500 rides.
I'd only tip a uber/rideshare driver if the experience was above and beyond... I do not expect this kind of service from every driver, nor do I expect them to try to provide it every time.
It should be a reward for exceptional service, not a default assumption for average (or so help me, sub average) service.
How many of them really wanted it? To me when Uber added tipping it seemed to come out of the blue. (And it was stupid and bad for everyone except possibly Uber, because the equilibrium total fare in a marketplace with reputation tracking is not going to be raised by turning part of it into a tip, it just adds uncertainty and friction.)
I don't know how many of the wanted it but here is an article that talks about it. Atleast is New York City they were forced to implement it and then it expanded from there.
> Uber might finally be forced to change its tune after New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission introduced a proposal this week that would require ride-hailing companies operating in the city to allow riders to tip their drivers. The need to follow a rule like that in one of Uber's biggest and most important markets could force the company to allow tipping across the country or around the world.
> The Independent Drivers Guild lobbied for the New York proposal, which it estimates will lead to over $300 million per year in tips for New York drivers.
I take them in SF regularly, for trips that aren't well-served by Muni. It works well. I've never had even the slightest criticism of how it drives. Compared to Uber, it costs more but never drives on the sidewalk and doesn't operate a Prius with 900,000 miles on the odometer and no windshield wipers.
For the free rides they've been doing in LA, they still tell you what it would normally cost. It's usually been within a couple bucks of Uber/Lyft, but Waymo doesn't ask you to tip.
It works pretty well. Sometimes it makes nonoptimal choices for where to drop off, but I can't say that it's worse than humans at making those decisions.
The screens in the car showing it's view of the environment are super impressive. It often sees pedestrians before I do, and it has some really cool features like warning you about relevant traffic when you get out of the car (not generic warnings but detailed info like "there's a scooter passing on the left" when you unlock the doors).
Some minor annoyances: storage space isn't great. I don't think the frunk is user accessible. Driver's seat isn't usable.
So, will these be geofenced to a small area, or turned loose on the whole Southland? If it’s the latter, I’m genuinely impressed: LA’s roads and freeways have a florid variety of edge cases unlike anywhere else.
Is this the only approval they need? I guess they will need to build some facilities in various places. Maybe they can start right away with the facilities they already have in Mountain View?
Having spent years driving there and the complexity/lackadaisical traffic patterns and enforcement — I quite doubt it. I'd expect them to have their own Cruise moment.
I regularly drive on roads with driverless Waymo cars and they're fine, at least where I live in San Francisco. They do drive the speed limit and, as compared to other drivers, they don't take the same sorts of chances that I see typically taken... which I appreciate. The only discomfort I have with them when I'm in a driving situation (as a driver) is that I find comfort in seeing the other drivers around me see me: if I make eye contact with someone I can hope there is awareness of my presence. That might not be a completely rational thing to get comfortable with... that person may have seen you or seen right through you... but it does ease my emotional tension right or wrong. Natrually, with a Waymo, that can't happen.
But all in all I've not had a problem with them doing anything unexpected or strange when I encounter them on the road. My couple rides in a Waymo at this point over the past several weeks have been great.
Needless to say, I wholeheartedly support their presence on the road and am glad to hear the program is expanding.
Do they really drive that slow... Or just, like, the speed limit? Or generally safe(r) driving speeds? All things equal, slower is safer!
Why would roads be anymore clogged than they are already? Because transportation becomes cheaper? So should we jack up fuel prices or insurance prices so there are fewer cars on the road? Real questions.
And onto the "stealing jobs" comment... Under this ethos, why would anyone automate any task?
> Do they really drive that slow... Or just, like, the speed limit? Or generally safe(r) driving speeds? All things equal, slower is safer!
So i have no idea about Waymo, but man i can only imagine how much drivers will rage over them the more of them there are. God knows they'll go the speed limit, and so many drivers absolutely loathe that.
As it is, i drive 5 over just to reduce the insanity of people passing/etc. Which, i still get aggressively passed quite a bit, but that 5mph matters. I'm used to drivers going ~10-15mph over the limit, and every mph under +10 is a significant problem for them.
I look forward to these on that point alone. The more cars there are on the road normalizing ideal speeds (whatever they may be) the better. People are far too aggressive on the road in my experience. At least as a WA native.
As a nitpick that I'm sure varies from state to state... All things can't be equal if you're going slower than the rest of traffic since by definition there's a speed differential relative to the vehicles around you. In drivers-ed in California for example the advice from the dmv is actually to go the speed limit /or/ keep with the flow of traffic. If everyone around you is doing 80 in a 65 zone then you should still speed up at least a little or move into a lane where the flow of traffic is slower. Automated vehicles interestingly are an odd case because no company is going to tell their vehicles to break the law even if social norms encourage otherwise.
That’s not how humans actually work. Driving is one of the last big job sources for millions of Americans and when it disappears there will be many people out of work. Expect more homeless and drug use when people have difficulty transitioning in a post driver world.
It is not a good thing to employ a bunch of people in pointless jobs just because we don't have anything else for them to do. That's not labor, that's toil.
If they were less safe than human drivers, one would there would be more accidents where Waymo was at fault than another party.
Having personally gone through several years of AV collisions reports to California a few months back, that wasn't the case. Indeed, in most of the small number of cases where Waymo was at fault, there was human driver in control of the vehicle.
The were a four cases where the Waymo was at fault. One hit a chain strung across parking lot. There was a minor collision with a parked car. One ran over and killed a dog. One hit a vehicle while trying to reverse.
There were dozens where the other party was at fault (lots of rear ends).
Now that you put it that way, it's probably tough to get in an accident with a waymo without being found at fault. How often does a car stop suddenly and unexpectedly, get rear ended, and get found at fault?
Never. If you rear end someone because you were following too closely to stop without hitting them, you're at fault. There's a reason why the three second rule is taught.
There are some rare exceptions like if someone's tail lights are out, but nothing that would apply here.
Or, we could recognize how farcicle it all is, and abolish the limits and make them guidelines, with tickets still being given for being reckless. If we're all safely doing 79 mph anyway, because it's not the 1950's and technology has advanced, just let us do that without risking a ticket.
Speed limits in a school zone should be 15 mph, but we care more that the children are safe than some number. If we have robots that are able to react inhumanly fast and are proven to be able to stop and not run people over, then they should be able to go at whatever speed that has them not running people over.
How about this: Since they are statistically better than average drivers, we study the results of sending them around town 10% faster than the speed limit.
It's well known that speed differences on the road are a major cause of safety problems, so unless you are going to have segregated self-driving corridors, having them operate at a higher speed than other traffic is dangerous even if the speed would be safe for them if the other traffic was also self-driving at similar speeds and safe for the non-self-driving traffic if the other traffic was non-self-driving at the lower speed.
>It's well known that speed differences on the road are a major cause
the speed differences you are referring to are road design situations such as highways dumping traffic into downtown traffic. delta V isn't recognized as a severe problem by IIHS nor DOT. speeding very much is.
--What is the effect of speed differences?
In addition to absolute speeds, the speed differences between vehicles also have an effect on the crash rate. This effect is studied in two ways. The first type of studies are those that compare the crash rates between roads that have a large speed variance (large differences in vehicle speeds during a 24 hour period) and roads that have a small speed variance. These studies mostly conclude that roads with a large speed variance are less safe (Aarts & Van Schagen, 2006). The second type of studies are those that concentrate on the speed differences between the individual vehicles that were involved in a crash and all the other vehicles. The first studies of this type were conducted in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, e.g. Solomon (1964). These studies always
found a U-curve: the slower or faster a car drives compared with most of the vehicles on that road, the more the risk of being involved in a crash increased. However, more recent studies, especially those carried out in Australia (e.g. Kloeden et al., 1997; 2001; 2002) that used more modern measuring instruments and used a more accurate research design, reached a different conclusion. They still indicate that vehicles that drive faster than average on that road have a higher crash rate; vehicles
that drive slower, however, were found not to have an increased risk (Figure 3)
I don’t think our speed limits are universally set to be obeyed. If they were set at 25 with the expectation of 30 to 35, it does make sense to acknowledge that if autonomous vehicles will actually do 25.
Yeah, they are actually. They do research and surveys into traffic speeds. Just because it is difficult to enforce doesn't make it any more justified to go 35 in a 25. That is a big difference, by the way. Almost twice as fast. The fastest humans can run at 25 mph (albeit at short distances). Zero humans can run at speeds of 35 mph. So not just a mathematical difference but a physiological difference as well. Suddenly only the fastest dog breeds can outrun your car... Sorry Lil corgi (they top out at 25 mph typically). Or I dunno, old people, kids, disabled people...
I know, I’m asking if they adjust for how humans actually drive. There are places in America (funny enough, Phoenix and LA) where going 25 in a 25 will subject you to aggressive driving from others.
While we're at it, do we really want our textile mills getting clogged up with dangerous mechanized looms that steal jobs from ordinary people and give them to the capitalists?
One aspect I'd still like to see them figure out:
As a bike commuter, I share the road with Waymo often. When cycling, you're always checking the eyes of other drivers to confirm if they see you.
I've had a couple incidents where I was a little thrown/unnerved because I couldn't confirm if a Waymo was registering me. It ultimately behaved fine, but I had to put my guard way up because I just couldn't tell.
I've wondered if they could use the light/display on top to signal acknowledgment? How do you simulate the precision of a gaze with a machine that's "seeing" everything at once?