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Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t seen any statements but here’s the context:

It’s Chinatown, San Francisco. It’s Chinese New Year. The Streets are tiny, narrow, crowded and full of the young and the drunk celebrating the Year of the Dragon, and nobody at Waymo thought to tell their cars to stay away from this area at this time (or they did and this car missed the memo and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time anyway).

> It's intriguing, people in a city with over $300K GDP per capita burning an AI enabled transportation robot.

That GDP per capita figure really misses the mark on what San Francisco is like. Also: not everyone here is in tech, or cares about tech.

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>That GDP per capita figure really misses the mark on what San Francisco is like. Also: not everyone here is in tech, or cares about tech.

That's why its interesting. Extreme wealth next to poverty must be a hotbed for things happening.

See: the United States since 1970. I think “inequality is destabilizing” should be a pretty tame non-controversial take, hopefully

There is very little “poverty” in San Francisco. There’s a lot of addiction and mental illness, though.

Are we blaming Waymo now for letting one car driving through a busy street ?

It does not warrant to set the car on fire.

> It does not warrant to set the car on fire.

I agree, but it is also true that Waymo shouldn’t have been there. You can blame Waymo for not planning ahead, or the City/State for not being proactive about regulating where and how autonomous vehicles operate around what is basically a festival, or both; and you can also blame the crowd for setting fire to it.

However you want to slice that blame cake, it probably shouldn’t have been there and it had no way of making that determination without being directed.

I don't see anyone here pinning blame on Waymo for the incident.

The street is so narrow that it has a car parking lane on both sides. Truly a scares resource, this road.

I encourage you to Kagi Image search “San Francisco Chinatown Chinese new years”.

Besides one or two main thoroughfares, the streets are absolutely narrow considering how many people are there during these events. Or hell just during a Sunday. Driving in downtown/chinatown yesterday would be extremely stressful and ill advised for the best of human drivers. IMO.

EDIT: actually you’re probably just remarking that parking sucks which hell yeah wtf, get those cars outta there. Street parking in sf is already so bad that they need to bite the bullet city-wide and commit to transit.

I just think it's ridiculous to say that Jackson is an impassibly narrow street. The reason the Waymo encountered a crowd at this spot is because some outlaw dirtbike losers were having a sideshow in the intersection. It is not some car-free paradise.

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