This wasn’t organic. It was organized by a tiny group of activists looking for an anti-tech flashpoint.
It’s a hoax. A fiction. An attempt to portray widespread safety concerns among the populace that do not exist.
Here’s the local context.
There’s a hearing coming up at the board the state of California appointed regarding expansion of the robotaxis.
Alongside that vote, the city’s quality of operation has noticeably deteriorated. Encampments are more common, drug intoxication to the point of collapse and physical decay is highly visible. Robberies have become commonplace.
These effects are now beyond the point where they be explained by pointing at flat trend data, or as a temporary effect of more severe pandemic measures.
A number of local politicians have been facing significant heat over this dysfunction.
National and international media publications have begun to distrust local publications for papering over issues and have amplified that pressure.
At that point, those SF politicians began a sudden unified push attacking self-driving cars. Self-driving cars have recently become more reliable than manually driven taxis in SF in terms of accidents per miles driven.
The attacks escalated to the point that false data was submitted against robotaxis to the California board, mischaracterizing accidents where another driver impacted the self-driven car while stopped. That falsehood was later discovered.
When those same people began promoting this “night of the cone” meme, the origin was obvious to even the most casual observer.
Robotaxis have been up and operating for some time. The city is in trouble and it needs the revenue innovation brings.
What does organic mean? Everything starts with a small group, and of course the first people to act will be labeled activists.
Self-driving cars are not organic; they are organized by a tiny group of companies.
I think the dumbest thing not mentioned n the video is that when they drive around empty, they're using our roads, contributing to traffic, emitting carbon, and they're not even transporting anything! Who cares if you're safer per mile driven if you're driving miles that serve no purpose other than to demonstrate your ability to drive?
I think (a) there should be bans on the vehicles driving empty other than to pick up a passenger, who must be close by and (b) whenever a vehicle blocks an emergency vehicle or transit or inappropriately blocks traffic, that company should be suspended from un-manned operation until they can explain the error and make a plausible argument that they have resolved the issue. If you're trapped in a muni train with 60 others for 20 min bc a vehicle that isn't even transporting anyone refuses to move and their parent company doesn't have an operator close by, that's unacceptable. Until companies demonstrate that they won't disable transit, why shouldn't people disable their vehicles?
The driverless cars, wittingly or not, sabotaged transit already; turnabout is fair play.
Transit is not down because of self-driving cars, but due to remote work. Cell traffic at city center is dramatically lower in SF compared to pre-pandemic baselines as compared to other major cities.
That’s not to say WFH is bad. But that’s the reality the city is facing.
Transit cars are not being blocked by self-driving vehicles at any appreciable rate. I ride transit every day and have never encounter it. I have encountered transit cars getting stuck due to mentally ill unhoused people refusing to move from the tracks.
This head-in-the-sand mentality squandered a decade of tax revenues driven by tech on vanity projects and ineffective non-profits.
It is further compounded by a severe lack of safety on public transit. What chief problems people are experiencing on transit are not a result of self-driving vehicles.
I can personally name six people who have been assaulted on public transit, been victimized by robbery, or had their homes or vehicles burglarized.
The entire mindset espoused in your post a fundamentally unserious attempt to make facts fit a narrative.
“Driverless cars sabotaged transit” is a fever dream untethered to reality. The state set targets for safety and interference with services. The companies met those targets.
And now the people opposed to tech generally, with no specific reasonable objection to self-driving cars, are trying to modify the agreed standards at the eleventh hour out of simple animus.
Transit overall is down because of remote work and people moving.
In specific incidents, failures of self driving cars in the way of transit vehicles, including on muni tracks, have caused delays. For people stuck inside those trains and buses (which won't let them off away from a stop), the frustration at self driving cars is legit ... As it would be towards a human driver that stopped on the tracks and refused to move. A person experiencing a mental health crisis on the tracks can at least be moved. An intentionally stopped vehicle cannot.
Theft and burglary, esp of vehicles and homes doesn't seem relevant here. I have also been a victim of theft in the city multiple times. I don't see how self driving cars relates to that at all.
"Driverless cars transporting neither people or goods are a departure from wasteful tech vanity projects" is a fever dream untethered to reality.
There is no data to indicate that self-driving cars have caused delays on public transit at any greater rate than human drivers, so that seems irrelevant.
Re: relevancy of theft and burglary, addressed in prior responses below.
Scapegoating tech makes for a popular distraction from the increasingly dire real world issues facing the city.
Let me give a concrete example. Two weeks ago nine people were shot at a street fair in the Mission. It appears tied to organized gang activity.
The SF papers ran with a story about “self-driving car obstructs emergency response” more prominently placed than the actual shooting.
The Fire Chief personally debunked the story, but it was syndicated across online outlets, and remains un-retracted.
On the final point, self-driving cars running empty are racking up the miles to prove safety to the state to carry large numbers of human passengers.
Those passengers can be carried more efficiently, and within electric vehicle platforms, than with existing private automobiles.
It is the first step to vastly reducing the number of cars necessary to serve a growing population, while maintaining the lifestyle consumers demand, and dramatically reducing environmental impact.
I should be clear: I'm am not against all self-driving cars in the city. I'm against empty cars on the road, and when they cause issues, they should have to show that they're actually resolving them before more unsupervised operation can resume. If the problems are as soluble as their companies claim, this should be doable. If not ... Then we shouldn't have to live with them. Given that incidents keep occurring, I think guerilla actions like this are at least as reasonable as tech's history of starting programs in cities first and lobbying for those efforts to become legal after (eg Uber, Airbnb, some of the scooters...)
So the last point is a fair one. Tech companies have a history of skirting laws to achieve market share, then using their customer base to get the law changed.
That isn’t what’s happening here though. The driverless car companies don’t have customers yet except for a small pool of beta testers, so there’s no constituency to advocate for them like there was with Uber/Lyft.
The State of California, anticipating that the development of self-driving cars would inevitable cause tensions, set up an expert board within the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC.)
This board is empowered to set safety and operations standards. These standards lay out rules for approval, including for accident safety, data reporting, and disruptions to city services such as the ones you mentioned.)
The driverless car companies have to meet these standards to be able to expand their operations in SF.
The driverless car companies have made significant improvements, empowered by better auto-segmentation and labeling. This incidents do occur less, are on their way to being totally eliminated, and the data now shows that they are safer than human drivers in SF.
The driverless car companies are seeking to expand operations, having met the criteria the State of California itself laid out, including for safety and prevention of disrupting public services.
Let me be clear: I am not opposed to guerrilla protest action in and of itself. And frankly this was a really cool hack in many ways: in effect, use of materials readily at hand, and virality potential.
But on this topic, the driverless car companies did things the right way. We should reward them for regulatory cooperation to reinforce that behavior in the future.
And they delivered an awesome piece of tech!
It’s a car that doesn’t need a driver! Just goes where you tell it while you relax!
It’s a miracle, and we built it here in SF.
For now, our community is bleeding people, tax dollars, and soon public services. We all want to prevent that.
To do so, we all need to row in the same direction for a while. We need the hacking cleverness of this campaign put toward getting SF back on its feet, and a big part of that is selling complex tech only our people can make to other cities that need it, then using that money to fund everything else we want to do here.
I'm really unsympathetic to the idea that "we all need to row in the same direction" which just happens to be the direction that the monied interests want.
When these companies actually make money, do you think they'll pay the people living in the areas that they treated as test courses? If not, if they think their responsibility is to investors only, then why should anyone else pull for their private interests? You're framing silencing criticism of public road AV tests as some kind of civic good, but these companies don't work for the public.
> "Who cares if you're safer per mile driven if you're driving miles that serve no purpose other than to demonstrate your ability to drive?"
You make a very compelling argument against student drivers.
You also seem to miss the MAJOR point that once cars are an on-demand service and not a 4,000lb accessory every adult carries with them everywhere they go, we can finally see a reduction in the vast parking lots that have eaten up most of our urban and suburban spaces.
Didn't people say that about Uber a decade ago? Somehow it didn't take. We were supposed to see higher vehicle utilisation and less need for car ownership in the sharing economy. Why should I believe it this time?
There's already a solution to this that doesn't involve replacing personal transportation with private interests that control all movement. San Francisco in particular used to be famous for it.
Sure, now apply that model to the several thousand sparse suburbs where a hundred million Americans live instead of cherry-picking the 2nd densest city in America (which is still, by the way, VERY car-dependent despite one of the best mass transit systems in the country).
There is a strong monetary incentive to make sure every car has a high utilization time. The cars driving around empty are there so they can collect data to prove the safety.
No one is targeting transit. Autonomous cars will also have a place in transit. Its highly likely one day you will be relying on an autonomous car to get you somewhere for cheaper than transit does today. AVs have real potential to get people to forgo personal car ownership which actually will reduce traffic, emissions and restore millions of sqft in parking spaces to be reclaimed for parks and housing.
We make special lanes for cars with multiple passengers b/c we think driving alone contributes to congestion, emissions etc. Driving with 0 passengers might be best for the companies, but for the same reasons, is not in the public interest. I think it's entirely appropriate for the public to place stringent restrictions on rides which do not move people or goods usefully. If you need high utilization, figure out deliveries and freight. Do _something _ useful.
It might be cool if someone developed a human-like robot that walked and talked independently ... But not cool if that robot walks in crowded places, doing nothing in particular, and stopping inexplicably. I would expect it to be shoved down a stairwell on day one. It just turns out cars are a little more challenging to shove.
There are only a couple hundred AV cars on the road. They are not causing the level of congestion you are trying to suggest.
Remember that these companies cannot earn money from rides right now because the CPUC has not given them the permit to do so. Once that permit is granted, the monetary incentive will be very strong. There is cost to the company for also operating an empty vehicle that they will not want to pay either. I think the incentives are aligned on both sides.
I think it varies a lot by neighborhood though. In some areas you see them a lot. Perhaps there are specific routes or locations that are considered high value as test cases? The density is high enough that as a pedestrian and casual observer it's easy to see them do stupid stuff a human would know not to do with some regularity.
Sure it makes sense that density per neighborhood would vary for testing and in the future will vary by demand.
Any new technology is going to have challenges as it scales. I think the expectation that the system is only used in public once its perfect is extremely ideal. The systems are doing really well at being safe (there are no human deaths linked to AVs nor any severe accidents despite over 1 million + miles driven).
Do you think people living in the places that are disproportionately impacted, who are being used as a test course, and who don't receive benefit in exchange for inconveniences imposed have a reason to be upset?
I think a small, non-destructive direct action, social media push and telling people they can make a public comment on official proceedings is reasonable and appropriate.
> There is a strong monetary incentive to make sure every car has a high utilization time
Not based on real utilization of cars today (5% utilization, 95% parked)
There is a stronger monetary incentive to sell at least one car to every single person :)
> Restore millions of sqft in parking spaces to be reclaimed for parks and housing.
That was also my hope. I don't think it'll happen. People will use autonomous cars like they use uber/lyft/taxis but they will still have their personal cars... Those will need the same amount of parking, or more given electrification and long charge times.
High utilization time is irrelevant; autonomous vehicles further encourage low-occupancy vehicle use (both additional trips and trips that are converted from walking/bicycling/mass transit), and should not have 'a place in transit' except in limited cases like, for example, rural transportation for senior citizens. They have no place in urban environs; there's no need for them beyond profit.
Ride-share vehicles crippled the world's cities by causing a massive increase in low-occupancy vehicle trips, increasing vehicle ownership, etc.
> No one is targeting transit.
Uh, there's been a concerted effort since the 1940's by the automotive industry to kill public transit, but ok.
Whether they intend to or not is irrelevant; these self-driving-car companies are clogging up our roads because apparently it's acceptable to "fail fast"
You won't be satisfied until you accept that the public has demonstrated that they want low occupancy vehicles by using there dollars.
People enjoy the privacy, flexibility, convenience, and safety of having a vehicle space to themselves vs public transport. Even in economies which have heavily incentivized public transport (Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong), people still pay large costs to get access to the incentives I mentioned above. AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.
I get throwing conjecture out there makes it seem like you found a real problem, but you have no solution. Even if you increased public transit with more rail lines and busses, you can't solve the privacy, convenience and safety factor with something that is public. There a reason we have locks on our doors and don't share our homes, even though most of our home is empty and we can only occupy one room at a time.
We need real solutions (which AVs are a part of) and not people swooning over idealisms.
> AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.
But again what makes you think that AVs won't be personal cars with the same ownership model? GM is suddenly going to be cool with selling 1/10000th of the cars they sell today?
There is more money longer term in a complete AV system then in personal car ownership. You can see it in GM market capitalization today. They are worth ~30 billion while Cruise is estimated to also be worth 30 billion. Making money off each mile is way more lucrative then selling a vehicles most people don't update for 3-7 years at a time. And it will be better for the consumer because it means more miles per vehicles which = less total vehicles.
> You won't be satisfied until you accept that the public has demonstrated that they want low occupancy vehicles by using there dollar
What the public wants is irrelevant; the public wants to eat its cake and have it as well, all the while riding a magical flying unicorn. Low occupancy vehicle use in urban areas is not sustainable, and never has been. There simply isn't enough road space. In the space of 2-3 cars which likely only contain 2-3 people, a bus can carry fifty or more people: https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/
Climate emissions goals aren't achievable without a significant curtailing in low occupancy vehicle use, as well. The most efficient production EV, a Model 3, gets about 4 miles per kWHr. An e-bike...even a cargo e-bike...will get around 60 miles per kWHr.
Further: we can't afford it. At least in the US, a huge amount of infrastructure hasn't received the maintenance funding it needs, and we vastly overbuilt our road network - paving to everyone's driveway and building more and more roads as traffic increased - without thinking whether the long-term expenses were sustainable. In the near future, bridges are going to start collapsing because nobody wanted to pay for the upkeep they needed and now we can't pay for it.
> We need real solutions (which AVs are a part of) and not people swooning over idealisms.
Aside from the fact that our current road network is based on not just idealism but outright sticking one's head in the sand and not paying the maintenance costs...
There are "real solutions" working just fine in most of Europe and especially the Netherlands and Denmark.
> AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.
The only thing AVs "improve" is eliminating labor costs and a potential increase in safety. They address none of the congestion and energy efficiency problems of low occupancy vehicle use, and by reducing the cost, the technology either increases profits or lowers the cost, both of which will lead to their greater use.
Safety isn't relevant in this discussion because people fear crime and rubbing elbows with smelly people who don't look like them. The reality is that public transit is orders of magnitude safer than low occupancy vehicle travel because collisions are far more common than crime, and public transit drivers are involved in collisions with pedestrians and cyclists far less than other drivers.
There also needs to be a person/people on standby to support riders or pedestrians in case of issue. Last thing the world needs is another supportless automated monolith where you're simply fucked if anything happens
> An attempt to portray widespread safety concerns among the populace that do not exist
It’s a good example of a totem. On one side, activists can use the media uptake to show traction in their anti-tech crusade, intentionally muddying attention and support. On the other side, a separate group uses the first to show San Francisco is crumbling and anti-innovation. Neither need any relation to facts, just exist in respect of each other; in their engagement within themselves and with one another, their convictions gain strength.
> Alongside that vote, the city’s quality of operation has noticeably deteriorated. Encampments are more common, drug intoxication to the point of collapse and physical decay is highly visible. Robberies have become commonplace.
These have been mainstay of San Francisco life for at least a decade: some neighborhoods suck and have a ton of homeless folks, and where they are tend to move around (in gentrifying neighborhoods). I remember the first time I moved here almost a decade ago and was shocked with the drugged homeless folks. They're still there.
Those protests will go the way of the Google Bus protests: make a lot of noise, before they disappear.
> Those protests will go the way of the Google Bus protests: make a lot of noise, before they disappear.
Totally agree, I expect they’ll dissipate pretty quickly, because there’s no actual committed support.
>These have been a mainstay…
Disagree here. Yes, these issues have always been more visible in SF than elsewhere: mild climate, permissive drug laws, and a low income area in the Tenderloin that’s closer to more affluent areas than other major cities.
The extent has changed markedly over just the last few years. Police don’t respond to calls. Home invasions don’t result in charges.
Physical attacks by the unhoused used to be a concern of suburbanites on a weekend trip, not something residents really factored into realistic risk.
Now it’s something folks in my circle who have been here for a very long time witness and in some cases have experienced.
I hear you that to a certain extent this has always been here, and I agree. But this is outside of the normal bound of historical SF.
What are your thoughts on the city's future? I've seen a lot of doomerish articles of late, many did seem to leave during Covid etc. however I still know many who happily look to buy property or relocate to the city right now. Do you believe the core innovation drive is in trouble, threatening it becoming a new Detroit? (Or even just the city itself, while the suburbs continue to boom and do well in the future as the city collapses - like Metrodetroit?)
It’s a good question. I believe SF will rebound as a city, and that it remains the indispensable center of the global technology ecosystem.
My level of certainty is such that I’m personally betting my livelihood and savings on it by building a startup here.
It’s really hard to uproot an ecosystem where multiple stakeholders are co-located (founders, developers, ML engineers, VCs, accelerators, executives experienced with tech business models) and move them elsewhere.
The specific cultural factors around openness to experience, centrality to internet culture, and global orientation are difficult to find or replicate in other cities.
But the short term disruptions are going to be painful due to the shift to remote work.
Right now this is compounded by very bad policy (saying this as a registered member of the DSA. This is not a left vs. right issue.)
We need basic enforcement of laws and provision of city services to allow the city to recover in a reasonable time frame.
I think the city is still great - there has been general doomerism about SF for literally half a century at this point: hippies, AIDS, the 90s crime wave, dotcom, gentrification, WFH. A lot of this is motivated more by what SF represents (the American brand of corporate liberalism) than what it is.
Crime is worse but not unlivably so. We have wonderful innovations like Facebook, Citizen, Nextdoor, and Ring to thank for the increased spotlight. While tech decamped from the Bay Area during the pandemic, and SF commercial real estate values are in trouble, plenty of companies are still operating here and people do still want to live here.
SF offers an urban lifestyle/environment you can’t get elsewhere in the Bay Area which draws young tech workers and hence companies. The crime would have to get much, much worse to threaten this. Others may chime in that it got too much for them, but this is a general trend as people hit their 30s and start families. The bigger threat is if young people don’t even give SF a shot at all.
Let me be clear that I love it here and will never leave. It’s an amazing city with incredible innovation, a massive tech ecosystem, walkable streets, fantastic parks, easy access to nature.
But our leadership has gone totally head-in-the-sand on public safety.
SF recovered from the prior cycles due to deliberate efforts by many smart committed people over many years. Now it’s our turn to drive a recovery.
And we can only do that if we can be honest with one another about the challenges to be faced.
Death on the streets via drugs, assaults and homelessness but because locals want more "empathetic leaders", that are hard on big business, so the leaders focus on that. Recent SF politicians are not proactive. They are reactive and in the worst way. They use bureaucracy to clog the system and strongly believe the status quo is good enough. Mean while, the urban area continues to decay, albeit slowly thanks to the regions weather and views being sought after. Very similar to national level politics where filibusters and repeals are trying to maintain the status quo or go backwards for the sake of the "better times". All these people are not leaders. They are just people who know how to get theres while they make you think you are getting yours. They don't care for the future at all.
> An attempt to portray widespread safety concerns among the populace that do not exist.
Guess you didn't watch the video clip then, because they both describe and show the problems.
You mean like Uber taxis in the first week of operation in CA were caught repeatedly committing grave traffic violations like running red lights...and killed someone because their software failed to correctly classify an object its sensors picked up in the middle of the road
Then there's all the problems with Bolts ignoring police vehicles, randomly stopping in intersections, and mysteriously all getting stuck in one particular street, causing a blocade?
Or how about Tesla's "self driving betas" where the cars have been shown to drive at pedestrians standing on street corners, swerve at cyclists, randomly hit the brakes, and drive at traffic islands/poles?
His comment is more about the false equivalency i think; papering over/distracting from other very real issues by demonizing something flashy but unrelated.
“What if SF never pulls out of its Doom Loop?” - https://www.ft.com/content/71d8013d-9d94-441e-b2d1-3039c0439...
-This one brought the simmering debate to the fore and put pressure on officials, particularly Mayor London Breed and District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston
-Preston begins Twitter push against self-driving cars.
-“New letter from CA state accuses SF officials of data manipulation.
In the 4 @Waymo traffic collisions SF cited to prove driverless cars are less safe, 3 were the Waymos being rear-ended and 1 didn't even involve any cars touching, CA says.”
https://twitter.com/annatonger/status/1673403230804385813
Consent of the governed doesn't mean unanimous consent. If I don't consent to being taxed, I don't get to skip on my taxes. If I don't consent to sharing the road with self driving vehicles, I don't get to sabotage them.
It does mean majority consent - or at least plurality consent. If people don't want self driving cars on the streets, then elect legislators to pass legislators to prohibit then.
When citizen initiatives (e.g., the Equal Rights Amendment [0]) can poll at >=70% for decades and still show no progress towards implementation, something is broken.
Because breadth of support and depth of support are two different things. >70% of people may indicate they support something in polling, but if most of those 70% are only weakly motivated and the 30% opposition are intensely motivated then it's likely not going to happen. For example, support for more gun control in the US has broad, but shallow support. Opponents of gun control are in the minority, but are very intensely opposed to it.
It's still majority consent in terms of voting. The point about depth of support is to point out that just because >70% of people support a given item on polls does not mean it'll translate into action at the ballot box. To re-use the earlier example: most Democrats would take a candidate that's pro-gun, pro-choice, in favor of higher marginal tax rate over a pro-life, anti-tax candidate that supports tougher gun control. The depth of support for gun-control is shallower than the depth of support for other issues. Conversely, most anti-gun-control voters will never support a pro-gun-control candidate even if they agree with them on many other issues - they'd prefer an anti-gun-control candidate even if they diverge on other issues. Depth of support is high. Thus, gun-control doesn't get passed because plenty of people who would prefer gun control still consent to anti-gun-control candidates because they prioritize other issues.
The idea is that claiming consent of the majority doesn't exist because initiatives that score high on polls don't get implemented by government is highly naive. People can, and do, consent to policy they don't agree with if it's in pursuit of other things they value more deeply.
I don't understand what you mean by what you've written. What is "active consent"? What, here, is described by that term?
A few people has said "WE don't consent". That's the first issue: a few people think they have the authority to speak for everyone. Is that your definition of "active consent", the commandeering of society by a few self-appointed authorities? Sorry to break it to you, but that's exactly the opposite of the rule of law. That is the tyranny of an aggressive minority.
The second issue is that mob rule is an absolutely terrible way to govern, which doesn't apply here. We have representatives for a reason. Direct democracy is tyranny of the mob, and mob rule, too, is the opposite of rule of law.
Also, re: the tweet, I cannot take seriously anyone who uses words like "un-alived". It's clownish newspeak.
I used to be very very excited about self-driving cars. Now I'm 1000% certain they will not improve anything meaningful at all. There are no urgent, legit needs that make these things necessary or acceptable. Meanwhile there are concrete, easier, but "boring" things we could do today to improve safety and comfort on the streets and highways.
Here's a dumb list of some of the automation I want to see:
- Automated speed and acceleration limits based on location. In cities, 20km/h. From 0 to 20 in 5 seconds. On highways, whatever makes sense. But, sorry, you can't go 200 km/h unless you're on a track, a train or a plane.
- Automated / smart traffic lights to end unnecessary stopping and waiting, while giving priority to emergency vehicles, transit, pedestrians, bicycles over individual cars
- Automated emergency vehicle notification to drivers, without increasingly loud,blaring sirens (esp. at night when the streets are empty and response times are 2x better than during the day in the first place)
- Mandatory collision mitigation and other safety assists; you shouldn't have to pay more money to get a safer vehicle (especially safer for others)
- ...but no autopilot allowed outside of specific places/times (eg. certain highway segments at certain times)
- Automated, guaranteed fines when speeding, running red lights or driving recklessly.
- APIs for cities/counties/regions to influence routing decisions made by maps applications: people are free to drive on small streets but the algorithm should not send them there. Before I started using it, waze, in particular, often steered me to complicated routes via small streets to save 90 seconds in a 15 minute trip. Cities should be able to align traffic engineering decisions at all levels.
- Automated engine shutoff and notifications to prevent idling and educate folks. I see people browsing for minutes before/after driving, with the engine on. People eating in their cars with the engine on, etc. In front of folks sitting at a cafe etc. Just ignominious stuff given the noise, heat and air pollution output (idling generates more toxic exhaust than driving).
It's nice to be able to walk places. Maybe a middle ground for having self-driving cars is to think of them as mini-trams.
The self-driving-car-mini-trams pick up and drop off at specific stops, on numbered routes, and they have a dedicated lane that can also be used by emergency vehicles (human driven).
To improve passenger safety the self-driving-car-mini-trams could be made larger, maybe the size of buses, which would have the added benefit of allowing people to stand in them, not use seat belts, and get off and on a lot more easily than crawling in and out of a car.
Sure yep. Why do they need to be self driving? We could build 8-10 people electric buses today, and let randos drive them just like we let randos drive lyfts/ubers.
“There are no urgent, legit needs that make these things necessary or acceptable.”
—Americans alone spend more than 70,000,000,000 hours each year driving.
-On average, not counting commercial drivers, each American spends over 13 hours a week driving, or one third of a full time job.
-Over 20% of the American labor force is primarily employed driving a commercial vehicle.
We are talking about a collective waste of human time and effort of 350,000 lifetimes per year in the U.S. alone.
We are talking about waste of collective labor enough to totally rebuild the physical environment: laying train tracks, building housing, raising flood walls, building pads for rockets and nuclear reactors.
We are talking about centuries of time worth of cognitive capacity to be used as leisure for making art, music, literature. Or simply bonding with families and strengthening our communities.
If that’s not a pressing need I don’t know what is.
Such a fake comment. You were never excited for AVs.
-As AVs scale, there cost will go below that of personal car ownership
-AVs maintain the same flexibility as personal cars, something public transit cannot resolve.
-As Personal cars ownership declines, real progress in emissions, land and safety will be made.
Your suggestions just add more regulation and fees that always end up impacting low income people more.
> Such a fake comment. You were never excited for AVs.
I was excited for AVs for most of my life, just like everybody, because it's cool sci-fi tech. But if you start thinking about the whole picture of transportation / urban design... they mostly don't make sense. Just like flying cars.
> As AVs scale, there cost will go below that of personal car ownership
Why?
> AVs maintain the same flexibility as personal cars, something public transit cannot resolve.
Sure. Why are we testing/using them in SF, a city that can resolve its transportation needs with public transit and light electric vehicles?
> As Personal cars ownership declines, real progress in emissions, land and safety will be made.
My whole point is we can make these progresses today.
Self driving cars and other innovations cribbed from sci-fi, are a distraction that prevent us from addressing our real issues in real ways.
> Your suggestions just add more regulation and fees that always end up impacting low income people more.
Actually, none of my suggestions would impact low-income people more.
You don't think giving 24/7 control of all personal vehicles to a handful of companies is going to hurt lower-income people?
People in the industry and those who support it are excited because of the positives impacts it can make. Not because its scifi tech.
At scale the cost per mile of an AV will be below that of an equivalent personal car because of all these factors
- High utilization means you are not paying for a car that spends 80% of its life parked and removes the costs associated with that
- Insurance, maintenance, and parking costs are reduced because of efficiency gains in a fleet configuration vs personally handling all those things
- Fixed upfront cost that goes down considerably as number of vehicles increases
Testing is happening in SF probably because the data shows that SF residents are high utilization users of vehicles and don't use public transit as much as you think. Ex Uber and lyft to 200k trips in SF alone everyday. SF is a difficult city to drive in so it shows real capability and a lot of the people working on this tech happen to live in and around SF.
Autonomous cars are here today. The things you are suggesting will require all car companies to align on new standards and develop tools for the government to interface with there new standard equipment and than deploy that infrastructure. That will require years more of work. AVs use the infrastructure that is there already.
New equipment is not free. It will add costs to vehicles and someone will pay for it. More fees (ex for speeding) are always a bigger burden on the poor.
I’d be the first on the team to code in a “clean hood” routine where the vehicle rapidly accelerates in a safe area and then slams on the brakes to yeet the cone off the hood.
I still don’t understand why there isn’t a manual override with a staff member sitting in a racing sim 24x7 who can “jack in” to any deployed vehicle and take over. They’d be able to do the same thing.
Waymo and Cruise both have remote operators who can remotely unstuck cars.
AFAIK they can’t drive the cars directly, but the they can give override commands, reset software, or make the car follow a manually set path. They probably can’t make it reverse at full tilt though ;)
Directly driving cars is considered very sketchy as you could have network latency spikes or dropouts at any time.
That said, it’s possible the cone still prevents the car from moving at all because either:
a. It creates a large enough sensor blockage to be deemed ‘unsafe’ for any movement
Or b. The car thinks its been in a collision, or thinks it can’t move without ‘colliding’ with the cone further.
> I still don’t understand why there isn’t a manual override with a staff member sitting in a racing sim 24x7 who can “jack in” to any deployed vehicle and take over.
Maybe it's harder for a car company to disclaim responsibility for accidents that do occur, if there is always the potential for a human driver to take over. Suddenly they can't say "well we couldn't have prevented this", because they now could have.
a manual override is the easiest solution here. we pilot drones that drop bombs in the middle east from air conditioned containers in arizona, there is no reason we can't do the same for these stuck vehicles after X time period has elapsed.
It’s actually much easier to remotely pilot a drone than a car for a few reasons:
- Cars operate very close to obstacles, at any given time, you are only seconds from hitting something. This means you need extremely high reliability and low latency. Planes have a lot more time to recover from communication loss before hitting the ground.
- Planes can circle in the air safely if they lose communications. Cars have to stop and then block traffic.
- In the air there are no buildings, mountains, tunnels, etc to block signal.
- The military has resources to set up and fully control its own communications system. Rolling out such a system on all public roads would be a huge undertaking. Existing networks (LTE) are not designed for remote vehicle operation.
So basically, while you CAN drive a car over LTE, there are a ton of edge cases that make it pretty unsafe. As mentioned above, these companies do have remote operators to unstuck cars, but they don’t drive them directly.
Hopefully also the first on the team to go to jail for coding clearly unsafe dangerous behaviors into 3 ton autonomous robots. What the hell?
I think software engineers are wholly unprepared and uneducated to be designing and building these things. This is a domain where the rules and responsibilities should be very well defined, and close to what you see in other "hard" engineering domains.
I'll point out that it's very easy to disable other menaces to society, like personal automobiles, by just booting them.
I don't consent to having to deal with automobiles in the city... They pollute, they make a lot of noise, they are a life-threatening danger to other street users, and many people operate them very poorly.
Does "booting" mean clamping, ie. locking a metal thing to the wheel of the vehicle? In the UK booting means kicking so it read quite funny to me.
Unfortunately, in some places (like the UK) clamping a vehicle you don't own is illegal even if it's on your private property. Cars are heavily subsidised and the huge external costs absorbed throughout society.
Also, kicking a vehicle, which could at most cause superficial damage, is not considered an acceptable way to signal to the driver in any situation, even if you feel your life or body is in danger. I don't fully understand why this imbalance exists.
I've long dreamed of a portable device that can produce an electromagnetic pulse capable of disabling a car. It really only seems fair that if they can disable me I can disable them.
Yes a "Wheel Boot" is another term for a wheel clamp, and "booting" is the act of attaching it. Booting can also mean to kick in the US, fwiw. I suppose I could say "I was so frustrated that the police booted my car, that I booted my car in the boot and hurt my foot!"
at a local college town, several young men got into an argument leading to a fist fight. One of the guys was a current athlete star in American football, so we can imagine he was muscular and in peak condition. A rival got into an ordinary car and backed into the athlete, who was [strong|drunk|stupid] enough to try to physically challenge the car moving one meter. The athlete had both legs broken, and the guy driving was "in trouble" .. so there is some context for future auto rodeo players.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36624172
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627272