California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]

I live right near Oracle Park where there was a big Cruise Yard, and there is a ton of traffic and cruise, zoox, etc self driving cars circling the neighborhood endlessly.

It's not as if I've had a overtly terrible single incident. It's as though they're causing unsafe driving conditions for pedestrians, cyclists and other motorists regularly.

Driving unreasonably slow and erratic, stopping in the middle of streets, blocking traffic, not responding to the need for them to move or respond as human driver would.

They're problematic. I could start a youtube channel or something it happens enough in my day to day life.

That was more of a problem in my 'Sturm & Drang' time. These days grannys on their electically-assisted bicycles are faster than me, hence I don't surprise car drivers any more.

I feel like this is a non-issue. The LEDs can be a certain size. They could be dimmable so their brightness can be modulated by distance.

All the things you mention are an issue with real drivers too, but we make it work because we can signal and communicate. Give these cars the same functionality and experiment. This isn't an insurmountable issue, but it is one that needs to be addressed that isn't being addressed at all. Throwing up your hands and saying it's too difficult is less than helpful. They're putting these things on the road with people. They have a responsibility to figure this stuff out. Especially if they want to go beyond a handful of cities.

no one cares until it happens to them. I guess that attitude is part of the reason why this will succeed in the end.

I've never had a fent zombie wave a knife in my face on private transit, but it has happened a couple of times on public transit. I get that it is technically "safer", but we have a long way to go before normal people will feel safe on it (in the states, other countries obviously do this better by not allowing their buses and light rail to be turned into roving day centers).

The distinction is absolutely important between public and private transit. However to most folks they'll be the same thing in the end. Maybe local governments can buy cars for private public transit, which could be nice depending on funding and all that.

You can actually be safer in a bus (aka public transit) than in Uber depending on where you live.

With Uber, every time you take a taxi, you are playing the lottery, hoping you get a normal driver, who is not tired, who is not dangerous, etc.

With Waymo, you get a private car, all for yourself.

I was specifically saying that people prefer private transit to public transit because of safety related concerns.

I like BART. It's actually really convenient, connecting where I live, where I work, and where a bunch of my friends live. Unfortunately, I have a negative experience upwards of half the time I ride it. Sometimes, it's minor, just some person talking nonsense to themselves in the corner. Whatever, puts me on edge because I lose confidence that this person won't transgress social norms in more extreme ways, but I can live with it. Sometimes the entire car smells like a latrine. Sometimes it's a dude laying across the aisle pleasuring himself. Also not going to kill me, but also is something I'd rather avoid, and absolutely can by not riding public transit.

Uber, by contrast, I only have to worry about the driver making me uncomfortable, and that's relatively rare. Maybe 1 in 10 rides will involve a driver either driving like a maniac, or reeking of BO.

With Waymo, there are none of those issues. Hop in a vehicle, it's clean, it drives safely, and there's no naked lunatics.

I drove a car into San Francisco once. Never again. Not having to worry about parking, being able to nap or work en route, not having to get stressed by traffic, etc. Massive improvement in QOL.

An affordable mid size car costs roughly $6k per year total cost for a new car, and about 2/3 that for a used car.

If you commute daily to work, that is 500 trips per year. Two weekend trips adds another 100 per year. Now we are talking about ~$10/trip if you own your car.

When you add the premium value you get from flexibility, then it's an even better deal. If you only drive 50x a year then yeah, just use services.

Timothy McVeigh was trying to make the US government pay for specific things it did to "his people"; Ted Kaczynski was lashing out at the industrialised world after living in isolation in his cabin in the woods.

[0] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/antisocial

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antisocial

[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/antisoci...

[3] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/anti...

[4] https://www.etymonline.com/word/antisocial

would be nice to get that one day. In the meanwhile I guess LA is spending that budget here on Waymo for even more cars in traffic.

At the same time every other story involves a horror over "going to dinner." They apparently don't abhor socialities, they just abhor having to be in the presence of the "lower caste."

I’ve been hit on by a few Uber drivers. (Early thirties guy.) They stop talking then forget after two seconds. Unfortunately, the person who crosses the first boundary isn’t deterred by the second.

That said, I do appreciate the chutzpah of the driver who tried to invite himself to my date for a threesome.

This is an uncharitable reading of someone wanting peace and quiet from time to time.

I'm surprised there's such a staunch defense.

It will commit to the ride and not cancel.

Ability to scale the amount of Waymo cars to an area is immensely easier than scaling the amount of Uber/Lyft drivers available and willing to go to said area.

Sometimes I want a chauffeur, usually one I have a relationship with, often I want a reliable ride. We’re all better off for having the choice.

We will have to agree to disagree on whether it's a beneficial change to society to disrupt human drivers with autonomous drivers. Personally, I found the argument that artists shouldn't be disrupted by AI much more defensible than saying drivers shouldn't be disrupted. It always seemed easy to look at previously disrupted jobs, like people getting up at 4AM to act as manual alarm clocks via peashooters on windows, and say yes, we should replace this simple act of labor with technology.

Seems dubious to me. Can't you still call an Uber in SF, where they've had Waymo for a while?

Maybe. Or you've just been "lucky" with the kinds of experiences you've had on Uber.

I've had some really annoying drivers, shitty drivers. People have reported assaults and some have ended up worse.

If this were a daily thing for people (which it could be in the future), I wouldn't want a 1on1 experience every day (twice a day) with a new driver each time, each with their own personalities, driving abilities, and needs at the moment. Forget that.

Maybe. I had a very boring experience overall with mine. I wouldn't have noticed if they were replaced with bots. That could be my lack of extroversion (or maybe getting all introverts myself. Few gave a vibe of wanting to chat. Just a job, after all).

But for the short term, I'm paranoid right now about autonomous driving because it is far from technologically sound. Probably more sound than the average driver, but we know that we hold tech a lot more accountable than humans. humans hold liability in human issues, companies are liable for tech issues and have the money to spend to fight any issues that arise (as we can see in real time with Tesla).

More importantly: the fleet is owned and maintained by Waymo. So they can achieve a higher degree of consistency. It is not the fanciness I value, it is the consistency.

Put another way: I can get a fancy car and a good driver with Uber Black. I would rate my waymo experience slightly above Uber Black.

Older US cities (Boston, NY) have great public transit/walking options, though I agree deferred maintenance is taking its toll. But if you look at cities designed around the car, for many of them it's just prohibitively expensive to add things like light rail or subways now. Austin TX will be adding more light rail, but the price tag keeps exploding and the route keeps getting shorter.

I'd be curious if anyone could point to any city that was built around the car where they subsequently made substantial public transit improvements that carry more than, say, 10% of commuters.

The "more funding" is always allocated towards existing rent-seekers.

And my opinion with getting junk is that if I'm getting it, I want to be paying as little for it as possible.

As a quick test for what you feel, try this. You read a headline that says "This city school received the most government funding of any school in the US". Do you think that school is "great" / "mediocre" / "crap"? My personal immediate inclination is that the school is probably shit.

public transit already does this

https://www.bart.gov/tickets/discounts

-Seniors 65 and over get 62.5% off -Youth 5-18 years old get 50% off

I live in Europe in a village of about 1500 people are there is no usable public transport (2 buses a day).

Relative to total area, mass transit is almost nowhere. That's also true for for total road kilometers.

I agree with your last sentence, but for those who live outside of cities or other places of high density, public transport is unusable or unavailable. Governments roundly ignore people who live in these places (due to expense and political irrelevance) so there is always a fairly decent percentage of the population that is "public transport poor".

Driving has high fixed costs and low marginal costs. If you have a car anyway, using it for yet another trip is cheap. If you want to make public transit competitive with driving, you must make the fares low enough. That often means paying a substantial fraction of the expenses from taxes. But why would you do that? Because once a city grows large enough and dense enough, public transit becomes cheaper than car infrastructure. Because it requires less subsidies than driving.

But then the Uber drivers often cancel. So maybe it comes out in the wash.

Slower is safer!

the speed differences you are referring to are road design situations such as highways dumping traffic into downtown traffic. delta V isn't recognized as a severe problem by IIHS nor DOT. speeding very much is.

source: https://highways.dot.gov/media/13876

--What is the effect of speed differences? In addition to absolute speeds, the speed differences between vehicles also have an effect on the crash rate. This effect is studied in two ways. The first type of studies are those that compare the crash rates between roads that have a large speed variance (large differences in vehicle speeds during a 24 hour period) and roads that have a small speed variance. These studies mostly conclude that roads with a large speed variance are less safe (Aarts & Van Schagen, 2006). The second type of studies are those that concentrate on the speed differences between the individual vehicles that were involved in a crash and all the other vehicles. The first studies of this type were conducted in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, e.g. Solomon (1964). These studies always found a U-curve: the slower or faster a car drives compared with most of the vehicles on that road, the more the risk of being involved in a crash increased. However, more recent studies, especially those carried out in Australia (e.g. Kloeden et al., 1997; 2001; 2002) that used more modern measuring instruments and used a more accurate research design, reached a different conclusion. They still indicate that vehicles that drive faster than average on that road have a higher crash rate; vehicles that drive slower, however, were found not to have an increased risk (Figure 3)