Comment by throwaway9274 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway9274 | Hacker News Reader

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This is a bad faith argument.

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.

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.

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.

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