4 ms·

When these go driverless there is going to be a lot of graffiti on them. Etch bath on windows isn’t cheap to fix.

electrondood 6y ago
And human drivers, who habitually drive at least 5mph over the speed limit, are going to experience some major frustration when these habitually drive 1mph under the speed limit. I don't think people are ready for this part of it. I foresee dedicated lanes.
- elil17 6y ago
  Or maybe human drivers will finally start following speed limits
  - akira2501 6y ago
    It's been shown that if you redesign the street, you can change human behavior on that street including lowering the average speed that drivers choose to drive at. Designing a wide-open 4 lane boulevard then slapping a 30 mph speed limit on it is a terrible plan, yet how often we do exactly that in our cities.
    - readams 6y ago
      The secret is to design terrifying, narrow roads with poor visibility! What an idea.
      - sethhochberg 6y ago
        Look up "traffic calming". There are plenty of well-studied techniques for discouraging excessive speed that don't involve terrifying the drivers or limiting visibility, and make things safer for pretty much everybody involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
        azornathogron 6y ago
        It's ironic that it's called traffic calming, because the effect of adding chicanes and speed bumps and similar things is often to make drivers annoyed or angry. Ultimately though, it does result in the desired reduction in speed. So yes, it works.
      - luka-birsa 6y ago
        Narrow streets without road markings is what we generally do to slow traffic here in Europe. They are safer and slower without the need for speed bumps. We have full sections of the city centre without markings under free-for-all and pedestrians can freely walk on the street. Less crashes and safer strees. No need to make them poor visibility tho. That would be just stupid.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - caturopath 6y ago
    People drive the speed that feels comfortable. If you design a road like a highway: wide lanes, straight, flat, open, smooth, no traffic coming against you, you'll drive highway speeds. If you have narrow lanes, narrow areas, trees, rough surfaces, twists, tight portions, raised areas, etc. you'll drive more carefully. Putting up a sign with a number is just "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      While true, this feels like a tangent. In this case, "cars following the speed limit" serve the same traffic-calming purpose as the urban planning choices you're describing.
      - caturopath 6y ago
        Sure, if you can't pass and there's someone in front of you going slow, it will force you to slow down. Most injuries and deaths by car in SF are of people outside of cars, and I suspect that the drivers who maimed/killed those people were usually in front / catching up, not following someone at high speed and had their victim jump between.
    - JeremyNT 6y ago
      If they consistently got a ticket for exceeding the number on the sign, I'm betting people would suddenly feel a lot less comfortable at higher speeds regardless of what the road looks like. The reason people drive as fast as they feel comfortable is that speed limits are seldom and inconsistently enforced, so people are more restricted by their own notion of safety than the risk of any legal consequences.
      - FuckButtons 6y ago
        This is (mostly) correct as any country with a significant Gatso camera presence will attest. In the UK people more or less drive exactly at the speed limit at all times because of the profusion of speed cameras and heavy penalties for speeding. (Up to and including a lifetime ban from driving)
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    I used to live in Maryland, in the DC Suburbs (Rockville, Gaithersburg). Anyone who has spent much time there, knows that they have wide roads. Roads that say "Take me, you gypsy stallion! Do 65 on me!" (with 25MpH speed limits). And they have some very aggressive cops that basically hide behind hedges, waiting for free spirits. They might not like forcing people to obey the speed limits and red-light cameras. It would be a significant hit on the bottom line.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  What human drivers? :) I can easily see cities becoming self-driving only.
- thethethethe 6y ago
  Hmm this sounds... familiar.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit
- whyenot 6y ago
  Imagine if driverless cars start reporting human operated cars around them that are speeding (excessively) or driving recklessly. Companies like Waze could even build up their own private databases containing the license plates of known “problem” cars they need to be extra careful around. Maybe that’s already happening.
  - my_usernam3 6y ago
    If so I'm probably on those lists from driving and skateboarding around Mountain View. I consider myself an unpaid tester for self driving cars.
- gerash 6y ago
  Maybe then update the speed limits? Definitely much easier than program cars to occasionally go past the speed limit.
fblp 6y ago
Yes I'm wondering how they're going to deal with vandalism in a city like sf.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ac29 6y ago
  Cost of doing business. Pretty much nothing is cheap in SF, I dont see any reason autonomous cabs cant charge 10 or 20 or 50% more than tamer locales.
bdamm 6y ago
The perpetrator of the graffiti will be documented extensively, so while this might happen at first, when people realize it's a risky path to legal problems it'll probably die down.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cobookman 6y ago
  If the person wears a mask...the camera & lidar footage wont do much good. You also assume the SF police force will bother hunting down the perp even with a picture for a crime which likely will go unpunished in SF with its effective decriminalization of petty theft & crime.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    > If the person wears a mask...the camera & lidar footage wont do much good. Didn't Sony/Nikon/Fuji go through a scandal a decade or two ago where a camera's infrared-based, low-light enhancer was effectively taking nudes of fully-clothed subjects? All clothing is semi-transparent to IR, to varying levels. A mask may not be an effective way to hide your face from a sensitive IR receptor. Edit: the camera model was a Sony[1] handycam, sold in 1998. It had a "NightShot" mode that removed the IR filter - activating this mode in daylight effectively enabled "X-Ray" vision. 1. http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/ad99e1a3930185817a1275d284408e3b http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/ad99e1a3930185817a...
- kart23 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/1344416256418484225 https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/134441625641848422... SF: where you can vandalize police cars for 3 years, get booked 3 times, and keep doing it. Waymo cars are an easy target: you know they won't drive off or run you over.
TheDong 6y ago
Why would there be more graffiti on them? Right now, it would be easy to go into a parking lot where there's parked cars (aka "driverless cars") and graffiti em, and it's not a very common occurrence for a car owner to get graffitied while parked. These cars will be even harder targets because they'll have always-on cameras, likely even when parked.
ghego1 6y ago
Apart from the risk factor of being cought on camera as pointed out by others, I'd like to add that probably there will be few chances to actually graffiti self driving cars. Autonomous cars have the ability to go places by themselves. So the most efficient way to use them is to have on the streets just the right number of cars based on the demand. Because demand, once the service is fully deployed, is quite predictable (this is already so for services like Uber and Lyft), the most likely scenario is that autonomous cars will be on the streets only insofar as it's necessary to meet the demand at any given time and place. I wouldn't be surprised if in a short time, thanks to ML, they'll be able to predict where and when pick-ups will be requested by users. Since it's quite likely that autonomous cars will be busy going to pick up users, or transporting users, it is very unlikely that they will give any chance to "artists" to make graffiti. Moreover, when cars are not used, given the relatively very expensive equipment mounted on them, it's very likely that these cars will be parked in surveiled areas. So, the way I see it, it is very unlikely that graffiti will be a problem. There might be few cases, but nothing systemic.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

And human drivers, who habitually drive at least 5mph over the speed limit, are going to experience some major frustration when these habitually drive 1mph under the speed limit. I don't think people are ready for this part of it. I foresee dedicated lanes.

elil17 6y ago
Or maybe human drivers will finally start following speed limits
- akira2501 6y ago
  It's been shown that if you redesign the street, you can change human behavior on that street including lowering the average speed that drivers choose to drive at. Designing a wide-open 4 lane boulevard then slapping a 30 mph speed limit on it is a terrible plan, yet how often we do exactly that in our cities.
  - readams 6y ago
    The secret is to design terrifying, narrow roads with poor visibility! What an idea.
    - sethhochberg 6y ago
      Look up "traffic calming". There are plenty of well-studied techniques for discouraging excessive speed that don't involve terrifying the drivers or limiting visibility, and make things safer for pretty much everybody involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
      - azornathogron 6y ago
        It's ironic that it's called traffic calming, because the effect of adding chicanes and speed bumps and similar things is often to make drivers annoyed or angry. Ultimately though, it does result in the desired reduction in speed. So yes, it works.
    - luka-birsa 6y ago
      Narrow streets without road markings is what we generally do to slow traffic here in Europe. They are safer and slower without the need for speed bumps. We have full sections of the city centre without markings under free-for-all and pedestrians can freely walk on the street. Less crashes and safer strees. No need to make them poor visibility tho. That would be just stupid.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- caturopath 6y ago
  People drive the speed that feels comfortable. If you design a road like a highway: wide lanes, straight, flat, open, smooth, no traffic coming against you, you'll drive highway speeds. If you have narrow lanes, narrow areas, trees, rough surfaces, twists, tight portions, raised areas, etc. you'll drive more carefully. Putting up a sign with a number is just "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    While true, this feels like a tangent. In this case, "cars following the speed limit" serve the same traffic-calming purpose as the urban planning choices you're describing.
    - caturopath 6y ago
      Sure, if you can't pass and there's someone in front of you going slow, it will force you to slow down. Most injuries and deaths by car in SF are of people outside of cars, and I suspect that the drivers who maimed/killed those people were usually in front / catching up, not following someone at high speed and had their victim jump between.
  - JeremyNT 6y ago
    If they consistently got a ticket for exceeding the number on the sign, I'm betting people would suddenly feel a lot less comfortable at higher speeds regardless of what the road looks like. The reason people drive as fast as they feel comfortable is that speed limits are seldom and inconsistently enforced, so people are more restricted by their own notion of safety than the risk of any legal consequences.
    - FuckButtons 6y ago
      This is (mostly) correct as any country with a significant Gatso camera presence will attest. In the UK people more or less drive exactly at the speed limit at all times because of the profusion of speed cameras and heavy penalties for speeding. (Up to and including a lifetime ban from driving)
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I used to live in Maryland, in the DC Suburbs (Rockville, Gaithersburg). Anyone who has spent much time there, knows that they have wide roads. Roads that say "Take me, you gypsy stallion! Do 65 on me!" (with 25MpH speed limits). And they have some very aggressive cops that basically hide behind hedges, waiting for free spirits. They might not like forcing people to obey the speed limits and red-light cameras. It would be a significant hit on the bottom line.
benlivengood 6y ago
What human drivers? :) I can easily see cities becoming self-driving only.
thethethethe 6y ago
Hmm this sounds... familiar.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit
whyenot 6y ago
Imagine if driverless cars start reporting human operated cars around them that are speeding (excessively) or driving recklessly. Companies like Waze could even build up their own private databases containing the license plates of known “problem” cars they need to be extra careful around. Maybe that’s already happening.
- my_usernam3 6y ago
  If so I'm probably on those lists from driving and skateboarding around Mountain View. I consider myself an unpaid tester for self driving cars.
gerash 6y ago
Maybe then update the speed limits? Definitely much easier than program cars to occasionally go past the speed limit.

fblp 6y ago

Yes I'm wondering how they're going to deal with vandalism in a city like sf.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ac29 6y ago
Cost of doing business. Pretty much nothing is cheap in SF, I dont see any reason autonomous cabs cant charge 10 or 20 or 50% more than tamer locales.

bdamm 6y ago

The perpetrator of the graffiti will be documented extensively, so while this might happen at first, when people realize it's a risky path to legal problems it'll probably die down.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cobookman 6y ago
If the person wears a mask...the camera & lidar footage wont do much good. You also assume the SF police force will bother hunting down the perp even with a picture for a crime which likely will go unpunished in SF with its effective decriminalization of petty theft & crime.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  > If the person wears a mask...the camera & lidar footage wont do much good. Didn't Sony/Nikon/Fuji go through a scandal a decade or two ago where a camera's infrared-based, low-light enhancer was effectively taking nudes of fully-clothed subjects? All clothing is semi-transparent to IR, to varying levels. A mask may not be an effective way to hide your face from a sensitive IR receptor. Edit: the camera model was a Sony[1] handycam, sold in 1998. It had a "NightShot" mode that removed the IR filter - activating this mode in daylight effectively enabled "X-Ray" vision. 1. http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/ad99e1a3930185817a1275d284408e3b http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/ad99e1a3930185817a...
kart23 6y ago
https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/1344416256418484225 https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/134441625641848422... SF: where you can vandalize police cars for 3 years, get booked 3 times, and keep doing it. Waymo cars are an easy target: you know they won't drive off or run you over.

TheDong 6y ago

Why would there be more graffiti on them? Right now, it would be easy to go into a parking lot where there's parked cars (aka "driverless cars") and graffiti em, and it's not a very common occurrence for a car owner to get graffitied while parked. These cars will be even harder targets because they'll have always-on cameras, likely even when parked.

ghego1 6y ago

Apart from the risk factor of being cought on camera as pointed out by others, I'd like to add that probably there will be few chances to actually graffiti self driving cars. Autonomous cars have the ability to go places by themselves. So the most efficient way to use them is to have on the streets just the right number of cars based on the demand. Because demand, once the service is fully deployed, is quite predictable (this is already so for services like Uber and Lyft), the most likely scenario is that autonomous cars will be on the streets only insofar as it's necessary to meet the demand at any given time and place. I wouldn't be surprised if in a short time, thanks to ML, they'll be able to predict where and when pick-ups will be requested by users. Since it's quite likely that autonomous cars will be busy going to pick up users, or transporting users, it is very unlikely that they will give any chance to "artists" to make graffiti. Moreover, when cars are not used, given the relatively very expensive equipment mounted on them, it's very likely that these cars will be parked in surveiled areas. So, the way I see it, it is very unlikely that graffiti will be a problem. There might be few cases, but nothing systemic.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]