Grumpy Locals Are Sabotaging Cruise and Waymo Robotaxis with Traffic Cones
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
- Cruise car stopped dead in the middle of Oak street at Divisadero, at night, with no emergency lights on.
- Waymo car driven onto the sidewalk to pick up a passenger on Scott street at Haight street
- Waymo car stopped, blocking the whole road on Carmelita street because it started a 3 point turn and then decided it didn't have enough room to continue
- Cruise car swerving out in front of traffic from the kerb on Divisadero at Ellis street without signaling
It's getting more and more difficult to distinguish between human and AI drivers.
I also love the scene where Dave takes Hal apart. We've always called the first computation the Macaulay computer algebra system completed "Hal's Song".
>I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
>Can't let you do that, Star Fox!"
Screw it, lets throw in the Car Fax fox as a state trooper, and I'm pretty sure we have a reasonable starting point for a video game worldbuild.
Call it Car Fox.
High On Life - Bounty Krubis: Drivers Yell and Cuss at Each Other at Highway Traffic Jam Sequence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs945iNyk0g
Self driving like regular transport should have strong regulations and policing , today police is not equipped to handle these issues(tickets?) and there is no strong regulatory body (like NTSB) which is looking into non fatal incidents and that is a problem
"Oh this is the worst! people leave them in the middle of the sidewalk"
"They are just gonna get stolen and stripped for parts"
"Everyone please, actively break them, throw them into ditches, or into the water."
X years later, people in Seattle love them - they are constantly in use. Less traffic on the streets, fewer drunk people driving. The homeless have a few stolen ones but actually use them practically (so good for them). And people have learned to park them half-decently.
This will be the same story for AVs. The tech is gonna improve faster than the complaints get filled, and very soon everyone is gonna love paying 80% less for their Ubers.
Real protests are fueled by real pain, and those don't just peter out because there's refueling every day, not just flavor-of-the-month outrage.
Meanwhile, the entities pushing these advances won't run out of gas because they are making money from real customers who find their service valuable (citation needed admittedly).
Time will tell which of these scenarios it is, but my bet is that people will find these very useful 5 years from now and the rough edges will be sanded down by technological improvement.
So, maybe they are stripped for batteries and parts?
> in the middle of the sidewalk or in some bush
Yeah, sometimes. The super majority are parked well tho.
The way we were thought about these in school regarding proverbs and idioms is that they were distilled through time to be their most economical and impactful form. So yes, the good ones rhyme and are either funny or poignant.
Also, do you really think Uber is gonna pass the savings on to the customers? People been paying high prices for rides for years now, why would they lower the prices when they can just keep the profits? Have the savings ever been passed onto the customer by any company?
If I'm in a hurry, then, the scooter has a clear advantage; it's not competing with the bus, it's competing with Lyft, and it's both cheaper and lots more fun.
Most of the time I use scooters not to commute to work, but to run errands around the neighborhood. Then again the scooter is not competing with the bus - it's competing with my own feet! I do a lot of walking, but it can be really nice to have a motor help you carry the groceries home, or just get you where you're going quickly when time is short.
https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...
1. An ice-cream store opening on a block with another ice-cream store on it. Owner eventually gave up, but there's an entertaining live tweet thread about it https://twitter.com/_fruchtose/status/1271280300228632576?s=...
2. A cafe where too many people would work on their laptops (they petitioned to say it was a zoning violation - coworking space not cafe). It was a nice cafe. Place blighted now
3. A housing project that would take away the Nordstrom valet parking lot. The housing project was blocked, but Nordstrom left independently. Now neither Nordstrom nor housing exists
As far as I can tell, if "grumpy locals" do something in SF, chances are that a normal human being would do the opposite.
Yes, but I don't drink and drive, which accounts for a huge amount of driver deaths (plus others of course). I don't speed at crazy speeds. I don't aggressively try to pass. I don't use my cell phone to text.
The average deaths stats for a person who does none of the above are VASTLY different than the theoretical average of deaths per 1M miles.
I'm not worried about my driving, I'm worried about the other people who are drunk, fast, aggressive, and/or texting.
Good for you. You are not everyone, and you are not immune from the consequences of the choices that others make when they are on the road.
There's another obvious long-term goal: to eliminate personal vehicle ownership. This is why ride-sharing apps are breaking into the taxi market: because the more people who enjoy not driving their own car, will think twice when contemplating the purchase of a personal vehicle, especially because it's going to become increasingly bothersome to buy and maintain these things.
Mark my words: someday it will be prohibitive for the 99% to own a vehicle; eventually it may even be prohibited.
And besides, it's not like we're just talking about replacing only the safest drivers' miles with AVs.
We don't really know how safe Waymo is yet, because there's not enough data. It's pretty safe: it's more patient and cautious than most humans are willing to be and also has perfect vigilance; on the flip-side there's more situations it just doesn't understand.
Waymo's goal is to be a more vigilant version of the safest human drivers. They're probably not quite there yet.
If by “average” one means “mean annual liability cost”, this is entirely plausible. Doesn't seem likely that that’s normally distributed.
A Tesla is currently safer than people that do that, and they want me to believe that system is safe enough to get into. But it's not as safe as a sane responsible driver.
The autonomous car doesn't get drunk. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get road rage. It isn't in a hurry, and it doesn't need to text its girlfriend while going 80 mph. Whatever its flaws will be, they will be consistent.
I took a Cruise home late last night and it failed to take a right turn that it took successfully when it picked me up. It mistook the space for the bicycle lane to be for the car, because there was no car parked in the other side of the intersection late at night.
Riding in them it's definitely like living in the future, but it's clear that the technology still needs time to mature. I'll keep riding them and provide bug reports while they're in beta, but I'm not uninstalling Uber/Lyft any time soon, especially because their service area is limited to the city, nothing in the East Bay or down the Peninsula yet.
The cars are small and cramped, but clean. No one is allowed in the front seats so it really only seats two people. Three if they're all small and friendly.
I definitely trust it more than a drunk driver at 2 AM if that's the question though.
The meat of it is this: city driving is harder because of all the chaos, but it's actually easier to be safe, because no one's really moving all that fast. If you floor it, you're not going to get going all that fast before the next light. On the freeway, a bad model could lead to doing over 100 mph and then making a hard turn, causing the vehicle to flip over and crash.
It is a strawman argument to say, "humans are unsafe drivers, so it is better to replace them with robot cars that are not as unsafe". Most intelligent, aware and skilled human drivers are consistent too. I've driven well over a million miles over the last 25 years, including cross-country trips but mostly in the heavy traffic in and around NYC and Long Island. Zero accidents and zero moving violations. If we want to make driving safer the very easy answer is to remove people who are unwilling or unable to drive well and safely. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, our disfunctional government refuses to revoke the licenses from people who have proven they are unwilling and/or unable to drive safely and jail people who drive without a license. The 95 year old who lives down the block, cannot see over the steering wheel and regularly wrecks her car continues to drive. The 20 year old a block over who speeds around without a license plate on his car continues to drive. The 35 year old with 55 moving violations and a license that is suspended speeds through the red light on the corner every day. It isn't impossible to make our roads safer - or even difficult - we just lack the political will.
No one wants this. At least, no one who thought about what that would mean for more than a few minutes. We built our cities in a way that makes driving a necessity. There's no need to fill already overcrowded prisons with people just because they want to work, or eat, or get medical care but can't do any of those things without a car.
After we redesign our cities to be walkable, and after we've invested in adequate public transportation systems, then maybe you'll find support for stricter enforcement.
You sure about that?
> Zero accidents and zero moving violations.
Good for you! You must be saving tons of money with your undoubtedly low insurance rates. Props.
> for a variety of reasons, our disfunctional government ...
Police have finite resources. You'll need to pay more taxes to increase that. Oh hang on...
> proven they are unwilling and/or unable to drive safely and jail people who drive without a license.
>The 95 year old who lives down the block, cannot see over the steering wheel and regularly wrecks her car continues to drive.
She passed her licence, did not total her car, and her insurance will go up due to her accidents Granny might not be a great driver, but just because she's 95 does not mean that she deserves to get shivved while bench pressing, surely?
>The 20 year old a block over who speeds around without a license plate on his car continues to drive.
You want him jailed, eh? Seems a bit much for a minor traffic violation.
The 35 year old with 55 moving violations and a license that is suspended speeds through the red light on the corner every day.
How do you know the license is suspended? How did you find out about the moving violations? How would your brownshirts identify these things?
>It isn't impossible to make our roads safer - or even difficult - we just lack the political will.
100% agree. I'm not paying for room and board for these people. I certainly don't want to default to disenfranchisement, since they've paid years of taxes into road construction.
What I would do, is focus on driving. We don't need to implement the damn Stasi just to fill your dungeons with your undesirables.
If he doesn't do any high risk driving the relevant risk comparison is much different than general population.
Driving skill is not relevant to his point (you could assume he's an average driver who doesn't engage in high risk driving). If he's under 50 and healthy that's probably a considerable risk decrease (reflexes/vision and less chance of medical condition while driving).
So even if self driving cars were safer than human drivers in total, it could be significantly more dangerous for him.
> Whatever its flaws will be, they will be consistent.
Based on what ? ML is anything but predictable.
Except, IMHO, at the moment, autonomous cars drive at best as a drunk, and much worse on average.
Since almost any ai system currently needs SOME help on a 100 mile drive, yet most slightly drunk people would complete that drive just fine, you could argue close to that.
Turns out there are a whole bunch of people who drive better than average. Statically proven by the word average.
People love bringing up this old trope like it proves that all people are shit drivers. Not everybody sucks at driving.
My response is there is a non zero chance that guy got fired from the airport and picked up developing software for self driving cars.
We still disagree on that topic.
I am not advocating for blind trust in corporations, but I certainly do advocate for pushing the boundaries a bit. Either that or invest heavily in public transport but I dont think that is going to happen in most of the US.
Doesn’t seem ready for real world use.
...especially since new cars are required to recognize speed signs and warn the drivers or even slow down in EU.
The vision system recognises the cone, gets confused because a cone on the hood is outside of the normal operating parameters, and refers the problem to a teleoperator. Pulling high-G manoeuvres in the hopes of dislodging the cone obviously isn't an option. The teleoperator can't do anything about the cone, so the car becomes stranded.
Yes, robocabs are annoying, but how would these forms of protest play out in another, less permissive country?
Waypoint controling has its upsides and downsides, and so does direct teleops.
The main upside of waypoint control is you have less strict latency requirements and its easier for operators to "drive," the obvious downside is that it requires the onboard planner to be working.
Direct teleop allows for more granular control, but has stricter latency requirements and is often annoying to actually drive with.
From a business perspective its also more scalable since you can just remotely control the bot with a mouse and a screen (and not need a full gaming setup). Also as you can imagine many companies probably also multiplex single teleoperators over multiple vehicles. Having indirect control facilitates this better since you dont need operators to effectively "drive" bots with their undivided attention one at a time.
5g does make teleops better in general, but its also kind of expensive and still incurs a latency penalty (i.e remote driver action --> bot action feels insanely sluggish). I think as you scale it becomes less feasible to do direct drive, as you said.
Disclaimer: I work at another AV adjacent company so this is just my take on what I think others are doing from hearsay.
> This aligns with their statement that "all cars are bad" regardless of who is (or isn't) behind the wheel. So take what they say with a grain of salt.
I absolutely hate and dislike bike lanes. They are nothing but urban sabotage.
Should I be able to put up concrete blocks in bike lanes because I dislike them?
You probably have never seen them done properly. Many implementations especially in North America are indeed urban sabotage for everyone involved.
They quite literally sabotage traffic.
Heck, even Berlin that is supposed to be "transit heaven" is waking up: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/06/26/cyclists-b...
Clowns generally obscure their faces genius
You're thinking of cars/roads.
And I think you should head outside and get some air.
It's worse. I'm modelling them using OSM and historic traffic data. I'm writing a book about the failures of urbanism.
And since they care about "surveillance", they are likely to be rich bike bros, so they can be profitably sued. Heck, probably just look at Reddit posts in "/r/fuckcars" and subpoena Reddit for the IPs.