Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco

> The zoning laws and car centric development of cities is the issue.

Well, the main issue is that most of the cars on the road during the busiest hours have just 1 person in them.

I think when the dust finally settles, the main form of passenger transit in urban-ish areas will basically be something that looks like autonomous vans.

Unlike public transit today, they won't have predefined timetables, nor predefined startpoints and endpoints. They'll pick you up wherever you are, whenever you want, and drop you off wherever you want, but they might take a roundabout way to get there to pick up and drop off other passengers too.

If they usually have 2+ people in them at a time, we'll be able to use our existing infrastructure (roads) at a much higher throughout.

None or few of those options are particularly accessible (EDIT: for people who cannot walk/cycle long distances). Public transportation often is quite inaccessible while still claiming to be accessible (like the London Underground and the New York Subway). Central management of driverless cars could solve the problem in a more inclusive fashion and isn't just more of the same idea. We should still reduce the size of the vehicles, though.

EDIT clarification: Accessibility for wheelchair users, blind people, and anyone with ambulatory restrictions. Most stations are not wheelchair accessible to the train and having to go on much longer routes to compensate is not equal access. And many 'encouraging other use' initiatives block all cars, leaving these people in the lurch. Something that gave door-to-door access to everyone, equally, via a fleet of cars, could be superior.

Or 1m+ people if you count non Americans as people. I'm optimistic that self driving tech will be able to be repurposed to prevent accidents even if fitted to non electric non self driving vehicles. The switching to bikes etc. is a nice idea but probably won't happen in a hurry.

> These challenges are all about edge-cases, and responding safely to changing conditions and misbehaviors from other agents... The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics"

Self driving car has failed to detect a person in the dark and killed her. It was demonstrated that Tesla autopilot fails to detect a child crossing the road. It confused a semi trailer and an underpass. You call that an edge case?

> The response cannot be "let's add a ton of fragile electronics in all of the infrastructure"

So instead we will add a ton of fragile electronics in every car. Instead of having 3 optimally positioned lidars monitoring an intersection, we will have 20 poorly positioned lidars on every car.

You don't need electronis, you can use paint. You can put QR codes that tell a car where it is in an underground parking lot. If we add a parrern to all clothing in infrared-only paint, that would help various AI detect people and tell them apart from surroundings. You can put a metal patterns on street signs that are detected by automotive radar.

> will cost a ton of money to build and maintain

And electronics in the cars will cost even more

> will break in weird ways over time and lead to cascading failures

You mean like the failure the main article is discussing right now?

> it's dubious that it would even work at all

And it's dubious this 'individual' approach will ever work. Every single argument you've made equally applies to the approach you are advocating.

>Sounds like a lot of infra and related spend via taxes or muni debt for a tech outcome that’s a privacy and autonomy nightmare.

That unfortunately puts it right in line with every other tech-heavy thing taxpayers have have to pony up for this century.

I think you hit the nail on the head with trains, because your parent is pretty much describing a modern train signaling system, down to the centralized supercomputer.

> create standardised computer readable infrared road markings, equip each traffic light and each lamp post with a radio beacon, each crash barrier could have a radio marker, create PUBLIC maps of each city, have a central traffic control sypercomputer in each city provide directions to cars. Have each car painted with infrared markers so they recognise each-other.

It is amazing how often tech savy folks can reinvent trains.

I think eventually major car manufacturers will work with the regulator to bring on new standards, and it will happen withing 15 years. Infrastructure upgrades will take another 15. Most startups that aim to solve self driving will either find a niche in that ecosystem or go extinct.

So I expect reasonable self driving cars to be common in depeloped nations in 2050, while AGI will be just as elusive.

In a similar vein, the correct solution to electric trucks is not giant batteries, it's simply overhead wires:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/uk-to-study-using-overhead-w...

We are not that far away from implementing negative interest on cash.

I think this is a bad idea. The potential for a malicious/incompetent/malfunctioning actor to wreck havoc becomes enormous.

Vehicles should assess and plan driving from first principles and physical sensory inputs. Networked inputs could be helpful as augmentation but it's not something one should rely on at all. Kind of like you shouldn't take a human showing/not showing a turn for a reliable signal of intent.

You've nailed the dirty little secret of the AV industry. Everyone's safety model is underpinned by the ridiculous assumption that a human will be (a) reachable with very high reliability over shitty cellular networks; (b) able to correctly interpret complex situations with extremely limited information; (c) able to resolve safety-critical situations by making planner adjustments, without direct control over steering and acceleration.

> If these cars can't safely navigate their way to the side of the road using local sensors, they are wildly, hilariously unsuited for autonomous operation.

You are a lot more confident than me that this isn't the case.

Yeah they have Lidars for 10s of 1000s of $ mounted and should be able to go for certain distances without GPS. If a GPS outage was designed as failure mode. But it would perhaps be one of the later items on any engineer‘s priority list since it is so reliable.

This is the difference between Tesla and competitors.

Tesla cars „can” drive you „safely” without connection to the network.

Some say that discard of lidar was a huge mistake by Elon, but he knows very well that this is not the way to go forward.

I'm not really seeing anything weird with GNSS. I have a continuously-operating receiver that writes its location into a database every second; I did a query over the last 30 days and there is no abnormal deviation in position. (My receiver is in a terrible location that can only see a tiny sliver of the sky, and is single-band, so I expect about a +/- 50cm deviation without RTK correction and that's what I'm seeing.)

I actually haven't looked at this data for quite a while. I didn't consider the start of the Ukraine war a good reason to start looking at my data, and I delete it after 30 days to save $$$ on block storage. Dumb. (I added some proper downsampling today so I can keep it forever at reasonable cost.)

Trusting my own data is always suspicious, so I clicked around randomly on the NYS Spatial Reference Network website (https://cors.dot.ny.gov/; the title of the page is "Shop", but accounts and RTK access are free). They operate a bunch of Continuously Operating Reference Stations and publish statistics about the accuracy. I do see a lot of reported GLONASS cycle slips today. I have no idea if that is normal or not; this is the first time I've ever dug that deeply into station stats. But overall, the position accuracy at the stations I spot-checked are within .5cm, which is normal. (Most use 4 constellations; GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo; on 2 bands. So even if GLONASS is broken today, one constellation is enough for good accuracy.)

If the government has degraded GPS accuracy today as many commenters think have happened, many people would have noticed. The reference stations have known positions; if GPS starts saying they're somewhere else, that's impossible and would be flagged. GPS being significantly degraded would probably be front page news; not just noticed by a few exercise tracking enthusiasts on Reddit. Or maybe it's all a big conspiracy and the US and Russia banded together to hack my database and the NYS spatial reference network. It could happen, I guess, but my non expert opinion is that GPS is fine right now.

WAAS has been available on consumer GPS devices since the mid 2000's and is not "professional" nor does it address reception/interference issus; WAAS provides semi-real-time position refinement data based off drift observed by ground stations within a certain range to compensate for things like atmospheric disruption of the signal. WAAS is built-in to the vast majority of receivers these days.

Multi-band GNSS is what helps address issues around reception like multipath and interference. Receivers used to be pretty expensive, and the number of L5 satellites wasn't that high until the last few years, but now can be found in even a number of consumer electronic devices, and the number of L5 satellites keeps going up (and as more satellites have L5 signals, things will get better.) Several Garmin sport devices have it now, for example. A quick search shows Maxim sells a multi-band GNSS chipset for $10.

There is really no excuse for any autonomous vehicle company to not be at least evaluating multi-band GPS receivers, if only to give more reliable position data in urban environs.

I'd be surprised if at least some aren't using RTK receivers, but this requires a base station within a certain range of the cars, or commercial service (such as that offered to farmers by John Deere.) RTK just isn't that expensive compared to even a single LIDAR unit.

Edit: they can tolerate at least some degree of GPS degradation and use dead reckoning / lidar data in some cases, according to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31940167

Why does this make me wonder if something is going on with GPS due to the war in Ukraine?

I just read about a sunspot that recently doubled in size [0] and maybe launched a CME in our direction -- we don't really know due to a power outage at Stanford University that took the SDO offline [1], anyway food for thought, maybe it's coincidence.

[0] https://scitechdaily.com/auroras-incoming-giant-sunspot-has-...

[1] https://interestingengineering.com/a-huge-solar-eruption

I would find it odd if they were not using precise positioning using local reference stations broadcasting corrections over IP or RF.

EDIT: Appears GPS/IMU/LIDAR is sufficient, my mistake. TIL.

That's not what the comment said. They said the system can tolerate degradation / loss of GPS data for periods of time, in certain circumstances:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31940167

> Fine localization should be able to resolve without GNSS input (with caveats) and there are specific tested requirements to be able to tolerate a certain number of minutes of outage even in the absence of LIDAR before position accuracy degrades beyond acceptable limits.

Could it be using a different protocol or CRC system that's more resistant to that type of issue perhaps? There must be some difference, otherwise it would just be more GPS, right?

> Could it be sabotage?

Given that even Russian pilots in Ukraine have been found to be using GPS, it looks like that would not even be necessary.

https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2022/06/21/exposed-capture...

Easy: If you have shitty public transport you are gonna have a shitty experience in it. If you have a well funded, well planned and embeded public transport system, you will have a good time.

But this costs more than just money — it costs space. And if you are doing it right it also costs you road space (busses and streetcars only make sense of they have their own uninterrupted lanes for the most part).

That depends how you look at it, though. To my mind, the extra walking distance with public transport is generally a plus, since it serves as a decent baseline of physical activity. Even a small amount of added walking can have a significant health benefit. If you add carrying groceries and walking uphill to that the effect quickly adds up. If I had a car or (god forbid) a personal driver I'm willing to bet I'd be significantly heavier and in worse shape, and consequently all the more unhappy in general.

Eh, most large European cities manage just fine, the car is often the slowest or the least convenient mode.

That reminds me of the preference for white rice over more nutritious brown rice just because one is, well, white and the other isn't [1]. Similar with white flour I think.

We need to learn to appreciate things for what they're really worth to us (including their true costs) not just for what they look like.

_________________

Health problems come because of the polishing. Polishing rice into the sparkling white form that most people prefer has three major negative impacts on health.

The first is, polishing removes most of the vitamins and minerals that are vital to health. (...)

The second relates to diabetes, which is threatening to reach epidemic proportions in the Philippines over the next couple of decades. (...)

Finally, polishing rice also reduces its protein content, which can mean the difference between being well-nourished or malnourished.

(...) And, then, over the decades, the dominant culture defined brown rice as “dirty” and fit only for the poor, while white rice was seen as sophisticated and modern.

[1] https://ips-dc.org/why_billions_eat_unhealthy_riceand_should...

My frequent train has that option if you go first class but it still just goes from A to B and is pretty limited if you want to go to C, D or E off the train line. First class is also too expensive for most.

> Cheap fares? You get decrepit busses from the 80s and the timetable's just a suggestion (what my city used to have)

I don’t think this is generally true... If it is true, then the I suspect government subsidize are a bigger factor in explaining the variance of public transit quality then fare price.

Take Reykjavík as an example. It has the most expensive public transit fare price in Europe (86% above the European average) and all you get are some buses every 30-60 min (with only a handful of lines running more frequently during rush hour), timetables from the 80s and a ticketing system that never actually works. It is safe to say that Reykjavík has an expensive, poorly developed and unreliable transit system.

I think a well funded transit system can actually accomplish all three pretty easily, as long as they are willing to sacrifice some convenience for private vehicles.

> so 2/3 for them I suppose

In Zürich, a monthly city ticket is around $50, and a monthly country wide public transport ticket is $340 (and really gets you almost everywhere). Annual tickets are slightly cheaper.

I would argue while not "very cheap", the prices are still reasonably cheap, especially when compared to reoccurring car costs.

Vienna, Austria: public transport costs 1 EUR per day without any limits. It is also extremely well developed and reliable. Most people, especially without kids don't even consider getting a car.

"You ever wonder where the food you eat gets grown and how it gets delivered"

the argument is strange, they don't exactly deliver 40 tons of wheat to the bakery with a taxi. Noone is arguing against cargo and utility vehicles unless they can be substituted by railway (which could be better designed, etc)

https://www.tescoplc.com/updates/2021/how-tesco-is-turning-t...

Are you in a state without an underreported health crisis?

Profitable. For whom?

For the municipiality a 6 lane street vs a two lane street with public transport and bicycle lanes can make the difference between neverending debt and prosperity. Places with good public transport and bicycle infrastructure and denser mixed use pay more tax revenue. Spread out urban sprawls and suburbs give the municipiality a lot of street surface to maintain, for very little tax revenue in return.

A good introduction on that part is the strong towns playlist by the youtube channel Not Just Bikes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg

> As with many of things related to self-driving cars, the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average".

I have an issue with that argument, because it's typically being used together with highly disingenuous statistics (like Teslas our FSD has less accidents per mile than normal drivers) to give the impression that autonomous driving is anywhere close to being "better than people on average". This is just not the case at least not in any region with a broad variety of weather conditions.

> Human drivers do dumb things in large groups all the time, like highway pileups in bad weather, or rubbernecking traffic jams.

Considering that most autonomous driving doesn't even work in really bad weather, I'd argue that humans are still much better despite the pileups.

>>the target doesn't have to be "perfection" so much as "better than people on average".

You see, I completely disagree with this assumption. They should be perfect or they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all.

You wouldn't accept a bread slicer that sometimes erroneously slices off your fingers, as long as it does so less frequently than people slice their own fingers on average, would you?

I hope we continue to wise up

If a core goal is really to make thoroughfares safer and reduce traveler injuries/fatalities, we seem to be ignoring or discounting some pretty obvious options, like minimizing car traffic

This vision where we all get around in low-passenger-count autonomous robot cages on existing roadways is just one possible future but we seem to fixate on it. At the end of the day the car is a tool but we've allowed it to burrow into the collective psyche

What about making cities walkable, bikeable, segway-able, wheelchair-able, scooter-able, whatever, with proven public transportation options like trains or buses running fixed routes for longer commutes? Much more energy efficient, way easier than autonomous cars, and conducive to much more livable urban areas imo

It will take some effort to change habits and expectations and revamp infrastructure but surely that's as worthwhile as all the time and money going into FSD?

Regarding trains anyway, a) there have been autonomous trains for decades and the numbers are increasing. b) there are 100x as many professional drivers as train conductors in the US - so it's easy to see why the focus on driving. That's where the money is.

The answer is going to look like: freeway and maybe roadway driving is autonomous while drivers are expected to takeover for irreconcilable issues. There can be no other way outside of someone actually factually creating general AI.

I'd be curious on the statistics related to new under-developed FSD software vs a new teenage driver.

The only way for either of these things to get better is through real-world experience.

> incidents like these are only a minor, harmless inconvenience.

Until there is a emergency vehicle thats unable to get through.

If friction becomes negative we'll explode from Brownian motion before an autopilot bug can get us.

This reminded me of good ol happy hopeful days of youtube before it was bought by google.

And that will usher in the great Engineering licensing requirements for building high-risk software.

We could have the same fear with all these satellites being shot up into space. Couldn't they all start raining down on earth with some poor calculations or coding mistakes in the course-correction software?

I don't know enough about this stuff to know if this is a realistic thing or just the premise of a bad sci-fi movie.

>>>>>Imagine, say, a pandemic like lockdown, but now only authorised vehicles may travel at certain times, or at all,

No need to imagine. This was de facto policy for quarantine in most south american countries.

You couldnt drive unless: - you were a doctor or politician, then only if - the weekday corresponded to the last digit of your plate, then if, - only before x time, like 10pm, - etc.

Blockchain for the rescue! /s

I suppose I could've clarified, I'm not necessarily looking at it from the perspective of the safety of people in the vehicles.

Right now it's just a small fleet of driverless taxis. Doesn't this demonstrate the potential for it to be, say, every single Honda in the city? Why even limit it to a city? A single manufacturer's critical infrastructure has some kind of fault (malice, shit code, hardware failure - dealer's choice!) and suddenly Fords stop running nationwide, or internationally.

Then I start thinking of the impact to emergency vehicles caused by a cavalcade of stopped cars, and other similar issues.

Again, I need to point out that I'm not trying to be sensationalist or hyperbolic. I'm ignorant here and am genuinely curious how viable these types of scenarios could be. It's clear that it can happen, I'm just curious to what extent.

Stopping in the middle of the road might be dangerous depending on the situation.

If there's something weird about the location where they are stuck -- maybe somebody is jamming GPS or whatever -- then they should at least be able to pull over using local sensors, right?

On the other hand, if there's some effect that is tripping up their sensors -- maybe some odd geometry that, for whatever bizarre reason, looks like a wall to them -- this pretty embarassing, but probably an inevitable growing pain for this technology.

Oh, I can see the screenplay being written.

"Coming Halloween, 2024! Killer Kaarr!.

Aiden, malicious disgraced hacker gets into the networks of, Joel, his successful rival's self-driving taxi company, Kaarr. Joel and Aiden were CIA hackers, but fell out over their mutual love of Klara. Joel takes Klara to the heights of the elite, but she still pines for Aiden. In revenge, Aiden hacks into Kaarr's networks and makes all the cars into murderbots, locking his rival Joel inside as the killing commences. At the end of the night, all the Killer Kaarrs are set to drive into the ocean, killing a traumatized Joel. But there's only one problem, Klara is locked inside a Killer Kaarr too. Can Aiden reverse his sadistic code in time to save Klara? Can Joel escape to stop the killing? Find Out, Halloween 2024!

A horror/gore/race film with lots of body horror as people are alternatively hit, crushed, bonked, exploded, and otherwise tortured by cute little electric cars with really tinted windshields and choice camera angles. Think the hokey rubbery special effects of The Thing with a lot of cell phones and car-centric jump scares.

> The taxi driver having 0% chance of raping or stealing you would be prominent a clear win.

I find it interesting that this gets mentioned so much - I’ve done some moderate googling for cases of rape by a cab driver in Berlin and the last case that went to court was in 2013 - and even that is not a classic case of premeditated rape (+) There is one case later where a passenger raped a taxi driver and one where two rapists pretended to be Uber drivers - they could not have easily pretended to be taxi drivers in Germany since the cars need to have very specific signage and equipment.

Now, this doesn’t mean that no rape occurred - after all not every rape case gets reported - but it certainly indicates that the risk of being raped in a taxi in Berlin is low.

Things may be different in the US, but even there my initial assumption is that the risk gets overestimated since this is the kind of crime that gets overrepresented in the news.

(+) the passengers didn’t want to pay the fare and threatened the driver who then pulled out a gun and forced them to have sex as payment. Still rape, no question, but not a premeditated rape case.

The robo taxi can't steal FROM you very easily, but it can certainly steal YOU.

Given the article, I'm not sure "never falls asleep" is a good example

Those are also all reasons for competing on price from the perspective of the fleet operator — robos (should) be able to run longer and cheaper than these pesky humans.

I am hopeful we will see improved safety but rather skeptical that will come in urban robo fleets ahead of highway longhaul cargo.

This would make sense if rails were some sort of outmoded transit mechanism, but they can be significantly faster, more efficient, and more pleasant.

The technology will get there, but it hasn’t yet. In the meantime, if the technology fails, someone needs to be available and able to intervene immediately.

speaking without insane latency causing me to interrupt constantly and with full bandwidth? where do I sign up?

Unless the emergency requires moving the vehicle.

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-fire-truck-block-san-fran...

Until we do a better job of solving these issues, we need to have backup drivers available in these vehicles, or, the vehicles should be operating in places where dumb breakdowns don’t block ambulances and fire trucks.

Rails are too restrictive for real life? I'm not sure what you are trying to say here... Rails are widely used for real life around the globe. In many, many places rails significantly out perform cars to the point that people choose not to own cars.

Makes you wonder how Europe, NYC, Boston, and (a lot of others) manage with their real life concerns and public transportation system.

Yeah but in SF there's enough every 9 minutes, and they don't make such great wages, get real.

People should get paid to drive their car to work. It's dangerous, has high liability for them in case of injury or litigation, and in any case they should be compensated for even driving at all.

That's because people like me can only ride bicycles because being such terrible drivers. Unless taking an amount of stimulants niggardly shrinks will never prescribe for the specific task of driving, driving would put many other people at risk and lead to an accident a day, whereas on a bike the maximum death toll is myself. And I suck up the accident with my adrenaline, my body, and the bike frame. Injury without guilt.

This encounter is very on brand for San Francisco.

Now let's imagine the same scene but with the car stopping right next to thugs breaking into another car :-D

As someone who used to do AI research, I feel the same way.

That's not true with most of the prominent examples you see. All autonomous vehicle fleets in California operate under the approval of the state DMV, and do things like publicize crash reports: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

The governments never cared much about how insanely dangerous cars are in the first place and these don't seem a whole lot worse.

It’s almost like a problem is solvable when you have the right tools and technology.

Could this be due to bad mapping data at that particular location? Even if it was, wouldn’t they be able to pull over at a safe location with what they perceive in real time?

What was the stack used to write such a system? Was it a lot of C++? And what storage systems did they use? Sounds pretty cool.

For fine localization, are they using dead reckoning with steering angle and vehicle speed instead of GNSS?

I'm curious if the vehicles also use an INS system ties to an IGS.

What do you think it is if you had to guess?

> ...the cloud rained on them.

I've yet to hear this expression. Love it! I will be using this!

I don’t update any software I work on without canaries and a slow (order of days) roll-out, you think the bug manifested for a big chunk of the fleet?

I would not want a car that's updating during a ride

Do Teslas update themselves while driving, or only when they're parked?

It seems like a bad idea to deploy an update to a vehicle in traffic.

They're only operating from 10pm to 5am so one would expect them to at least update off hours.

If so, they have a massive design flaw!

It doesn't have to. A lot of public transport is already driverless too.

I would imagine it stays the same in high density cities where it's viable to have metro systems and there isn't enough road space for everyone.

Not totally on topic, but what's your take on being able to roll out autonomous vehicles in places with more "fluid" driving habits? I've driven in some crazy environments in the past, but I just came back from a very large country (let's call it an eighth of the world's population) where I can't imagine renting a car and driving there because of the near complete disregard they have for official traffic rules. Obviously they're just following a different set of rules, because people don't just crash into each other, but in that situation do you program the car to follow government rules or local custom?

>but to get away from that you need gradual steps

Given that you bring up the space program in the same post I'll stick with the metaphor and point out that you can't go to the moon by climbing up trees, or as Russ Ackoff said, doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong, because making the wrong thing more efficient just makes things worse.

If you want fully automated, efficient transport this technology already exists, it's train and subway systems. We even know how to virtually automate them 100% already, 24/7. With the tens of bilions if not more spent on driverless cars you could have actually rebuilt a decent chunk of infrastructure.

Having individual people drive around in two tons of steel to buy a bag of groceries is fundamentally stupid and its destroying cities, whether the car is electric or automated doesn't matter that much and there's no gradual change away from it, only a disruptive one.

> Of course if you are against automation in all senses (e.g. they're putting people out of work!") that's a different discussion.

I usually just tell them to go churn butter and stop driving their own car if that's a real position they have. I don't think I've ever heard a sillier position, ever.

> I love going directly from point A to B in a private space and I'm not ashamed to admit it. This provides value to my life in the form of comfort and convenience, factors that are so frequently waved away as irrelevant by anyone screaming "car culture".

Its not irrelevant. But driving becomes better the less people are taking cars. So, even for people who would never take public transport or something like that, its beneficial to invest in it.

Being able to take a car is a freedom, HAVING to take one isn't.

> Public transportation could take the form of government-owned fleets of self-driving electric cars

It absolutely could not, here simply is not enough space for all those cars. A heavy rail metro line can carry up to 60 thousand passengers per hour per direction, which is the equivalent of a 30 lane highway.

Same observed facts but different conclusion… As a commitment device I now put junk food on top of my shopping. The judgment of my fitter fellow train riding citizens helps me realize my aspirations of health.

That said, I paid a lot to live right by a good stop on a good line b/c I too like directness.

Sounds just like a taxi with a discreet driver.

Except, you sorta can. See "superblocks" in places like Barcelona

It’s not easy, for sure.

But it has been done. It’s a matter of will. Not saying it’s de facto a good idea. But cities can be refactored. See : Haussmann.

Are you from the US? I find the kind of passive statement about the state of systems prevalent here. ( be it public transportation, internet infrastructure, political framework )

I start to doubt the capacity of this country to adapt.

Sometimes the market is not worth existing if it harms the planet. And most cities were actually designed for streetcar lines in the U.S., that includes all the big ones in California too. We just need to reengage that, and do simple things like give the existing bus networks signal preemption and their own lanes. Plus considering most car trips are under 5 miles and california has good weather, it makes no sense why there shouldn't be bike lanes absolutely everywhere and the majority of journeys done on bike or ebike.

Dutch cities looked a lot more like American cities pretty recently, and American cities were full of smog pretty recently too. You can change a lot in a decade or three.

> Cities cannot easily be "redesigned".

Tell that to Jersey City:

https://youtu.be/1mC1l8L5aBA

Transport infrastructure in cities absolutely can be redesigned quickly, if you’re willing to take a quick and dirty approach in the short term. Which is usually enough when it comes to influencing people’s behavior; it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be functional and feel safe.

Sure they can and do. Here are 10 pedestrian-friendly redesigns from the last 10 years in one of the largest and densest cities in the world:

https://www.6sqft.com/before-after-10-nyc-blocks-and-enclave...

and a few more examples here, with the designer talking about the process:

https://www.wired.com/video/watch/wired-news-and-science-str...

AI is an extremely difficult challenge imposed by the current constraint. Change the constraint, then you don't need an AI to drive cars.

Sometimes you can't even refactor software like they do neighborhoods.

I mean refactoring production software is no easy feat either

No, but trains could reduce trucking.

On the other hand you are comparing the costs of tangible fully built out infrastructure to what at this point has been marginally scaled up robotics class exercises

And how, exactly, do the investors get like 5x their money back in less than 10 years?

we only have bags full of groceries because zoning prohibits grocery stores being near where people live in most place. So you need a car and since its a pain, you migt as well stock up on as much as you can while you're at it.

If it were, you'd probably just go on a 10 minute walk and pickup enough for two days of food.

It's because the commenter's solution to the problems of waste, noise, pollution, obesity, and people dying and getting maimed through traffic violence, is, essentially, the removal of a technological layer. Driverless cars, in opposition, is the addition of a technological layer.

We are all modernists now. Essentially, this means that we perceive technology in itself as a value. The primary value is not the end goal, say, for example, a healthy urban environment. No, instead, living in a sci-fi future with robotic vehicles is a value, because it is technologically more advanced than a future without that. In modernism, it's a sickness of the mind really, a solution cannot be imagined, unless it involves technological mediation. This has been the curse of human civilization for a good 100 years now.

Anyways, I don't think research in driverless cars is wasted. They are better than the current state of affairs. They can only be a marginal improvement though, they are not a paradigm shift.

don't forget there's $ on the line: a lot of "hackers" here are only corporate slaves and will do anything for a salary, just like good nazi soldiers.

You must be new to HN

The waymo vehicles are much more recent though. All of a sudden they're all over.

Magazine article title in 2080:

The quaint subculture of people who drive their cars.

[Parent didn’t say it but headline does] Taxis though?

Very true! Cities in the US invest much too little in things like bike lanes and public transit which I think leads to the annoyingly car centric nature of US cities.

In some sense it’s not the taxi driver or ride share drivers fault they block the road or bike lanes it’s really just the system they are thrown into.

Taxis in my city are exempted from temporarily blocking bike lanes to unload or load passengers. There was (and still isn't) such an exception for TNCs, so them doing it is illegal.

The number of taxis is also capped (medallions), so the number of taxis in bike lanes was limited.

Then TNCs came along, and the number of taxi-like trips exploded, and suddenly there are far, far more drivers blocking bike lanes.

Furhermore, taxis were far better to deal with if you're a cyclist. There is a dedicated police unit for dealing with reports of problems with vehicle condition/cleanliness, operation, billing, etc. If you call in with a problem, a record is kept of such complaints, and a sworn officer investigates. Taxis have to carry a fairly high level of insurance.

And generally speaking, taxis were better for everyone, because: They are subject to random police inspection for condition, cleanliness, and adherence to regulations. They are required to pick up or drop off anywhere in the city, and can be fined if they refuse service from or to a particular area. They are required to have a certain number of handicapped-accessible vehicles and accommodate handicapped service requests.

TNCs, as they are called, have skirted all of this. In my city they turned out to generate a massive number of excess car trips - causing a huge increase in pollution and congestion.

Delivery trucks are worse than both, blocking both bike lanes, cross walks, and traffic

At this point in time, I believe they cannot issue a moving violation to an autonomous car as it does not have a driver. The safety driver (if there is one), can be cited though.

See the autonomous vehicle guidelines used by the SFPD: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21970950/av-interacti...

I assume that traffic violations like this are handled differently than those with a human driver given the permitting and reporting required for the self driving companies operating in SF. That said it’s SF so who knows…

AFAIK: no. Most PD are very against use of photo-based retroactive citations, and that's what this would require. Of course in theory they have the authority to do so, it just never seems to happen.

Related: can a tow truck operator safely impound one?

Google is running a robotaxi service in SF though. Just not that one.

Surprisingly I always see them testing in Los Altos. Surely that place has the most rich busybodys of all, and yet they haven't been sued for causing traffic or something.