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Having ridden in a Waymo in Phoenix a month ago, I don’t think they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan traffic. As an example, during my ride

Having ridden in a Waymo in Phoenix a month ago, I don’t think they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan traffic. As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed turns several times forcing a reroute around the block because it couldn’t change lanes because the driver in the next lane didn’t let it in. A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to get ahead of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch over the line to force themselves in. The Waymo car just maintained its speed and lane position until it was too late to turn. I can’t imagine how the car would fare in NYC with its famously aggressive drivers.

curiousllama 5y ago
Seems like a great reason to test, gather data, and improve in NYC, no?
- tonypags 5y ago
  I can't wait to see one and punch the hood and yell "I'm walkin' here!"
  - tempest_ 5y ago
    I don't know about New York but I live in a major city and I wonder what will happen when the homeless population figures out they can mess with them.
    - vntok 5y ago
      What is this population currently doing with cars operated by humans and how would it be any different?
      - dont__panic 5y ago
        In my city, mostly throwing glass bottles at vehicles and screaming.
      - tempest_ 5y ago
        It is not uncommon to see someone cut across the road and scream at people in cars or throw things. Depending on the driver lots of different stuff happens. Some will drive around them, others get out and confront them etc. I suspect an automated vehicle will just come to a stop an wait.
        stevenwoo 5y ago
        Worst case, add one more person armed with a crowbar and then we have the smash and grab thieves that seem to rampant in San Francisco with a very compliant automated driver stuck behind the accomplice just standing in front of the vehicle.
      - natch 5y ago
        Envisioning a "keep summer safe" approach…
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      "Mess" with them? WDYM? I live in SF by the way.
- ethnt 5y ago
  Sounds more like a great reason to stay away from some of the most chaotic traffic in the US until it can be considered safer. There are far, far more pedestrians in NYC than in Phoenix, and I do not trust a Waymo car to not hit some of them.
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
    In the article (only a few paragraphs btw) it specifically says the goal is to map and have safety operators manually controlling all the vehicles.
  - wepple 5y ago
    When I got my NYC drivers license, the full end to end test was 8 minutes (I got a printout) on empty roads. I’d take a high quality autonomous vehicle over a tired Uber driver any day as a pedestrian
    - dml2135 5y ago
      Well I think "high quality" is doing a lot there. Obviously autonomous vehicles would be safer if they work perfectly -- the concern is that they will not.
    - ridethebike 5y ago
      Yeah, approximately 10 minutes for me to pass driving test (from second attempt). And then around a year of driving (effectively training myself) in city to get more or less comfortable with traffic.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - mpalmer 5y ago
    There are people behind the wheel.
  - deegles 5y ago
    I trust a Waymo car way-more than Tesla's autopilot...
- cjrp 5y ago
  Sounds like a great reason to train the model on a closed road with a trained (and consenting) driver playing the role of "lane-blocking-driver" (in that example).
  - natch 5y ago
    But that would take about a billion years, with all the variations and edge cases.
    - RandallBrown 5y ago
      It would take the same amount of time if they're on a closed course or in a city. The difference is you'd need to pay a lot more people to work on it.
      - natch 5y ago
        Or you could have a large fleet of a million plus instrumented vehicles gathering data as they drive, then you could use that real world data to analyze and learn from all sorts of situations.
      - _ea1k 5y ago
        Yeah, and the real world has advantages as the response of human drivers is likely more realistic. I'd bet they use this data to feed their simulators.
    - jonas21 5y ago
      They also train in simulation, where they modify real scenarios to run through variations and edge cases. [1] As of last year, they'd driven 15 billion miles in simulation - which is more than a typical person will drive in a million years. Still a ways to go to get to a billion though. [1] https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--simulation27.html https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...
      - wolverine876 5y ago
- the-pigeon 5y ago
  But to what end? Gathering more data on a problem you don't know how to solve won't give you a solution to solving it. We don't have any evidence to support that current AI is capable of the advanced problem solving the city driving requires.
paxys 5y ago
Every city on earth thinks their traffic is the most chaotic. Having driven around Manhattan a lot, I'd say it is probably the easiest use case for automation. Wide streets, perfect grid, slow traffic, flat, standard weather conditions, no two-way traffic lanes to cross. In fact I fail to see how this data would even be valuable to Waymo compared to what they are already getting from Phoenix and San Francisco.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Yes yes, never mind the pedestrians for whom crosswalks and walk indicators are mere suggestions, or the thousands of delivery guys going 30mph on e-bikes in every possible (different from legal!) direction of travel. And while there are lots of wide, slow, neatly gridded streets, there are tons of streets that are none of those things. NYC is certainly not the most chaotic, but it’s a billion times more so than Phoenix.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    This is just east coast cities.. Something that astonished me when I moved to SF was how little people jaywalk here.
    - ethanbond 5y ago
      Correct! Functional cities have rampant jaywalking.
    - the-rc 5y ago
      It's worse than that. Not only they don't jaywalk, they stand or wander randomly all over the sidewalk/corner, getting in the way of those who are trying to get somewhere. Downtown SJ might be the winner, though. Even at noon, in broad daylight, you might not see a car for a quarter or half mile (SF is never that deserted), yet pedestrians wait for the walk signal. Craziness. At least they don't give jaywalkers the stare of disapproval you'd get in Japan.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
nova22033 5y ago
A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to get ahead of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch over the line to force themselves in Is this exactly the kind of behavior that would make self-driving cars safer?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  It will be safer but it will also be stopped in one place for a long time, possibly forever. A driver attempting to proceed through an intersection in Manhattan needs to present a credible appearance of being willing to kill someone, otherwise the pedestrians and other cars will just block it in a continuous parade, regardless of the state of the signals. I don't really see how you can program a car to deal with that.
ddp26 5y ago
Agree, it's perplexing that Waymo thinks it makes more sense to start mapping out NYC rather than making the product work in Phoenix or SF. You could interpret this as confidence, i.e. they're so close to a working service in Phoenix/SF that they want to lay the groundwork for NYC right away. Or you could interpret is as a lack of confidence, i.e. they don't have much progress to report, and they're positioning that as "the reason we don't have a working product yet is that we're trying to solve the whole problem at once, and that's really hard."
sschueller 5y ago
As a Massachusetts driver I think it would be great to get as many of these on the road because it would be free flowing traffic for me without having to deal with people being pissed off. All the things I don't do because a human is driving I could start doing. Drive all the way to the end of a line of cars taking an exit ramp and just cut it. The waymo car will always yield. Same goes for zipper traffic, just go for it, waymo will back off. Could probably also steal a parking spot from a waymo vehicle...
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Imagine if Waymo had started business in Manhattan and then deployed the trained vehicles in Phoenix.
jrockway 5y ago
> As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed turns several times forcing a reroute around the block because it couldn’t change lanes because the driver in the next lane didn’t let it in. This is basically how I navigate NYC on my bike. Sometimes I can easily make a left turn, and do. Sometimes I evaluate that that's not possible, and make three rights at the next block instead. It works out in the end.
wodenokoto 5y ago
> I don’t think they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan traffic. That's why they are starting to map new york and record human driving. > Our vehicles will be manually operated by autonomous specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance our technology in support of our mission to make roads safer. They are not starting any sort of taxi service, nor are they letting the computer drive, according to the article.

curiousllama 5y ago

Seems like a great reason to test, gather data, and improve in NYC, no?

tonypags 5y ago
I can't wait to see one and punch the hood and yell "I'm walkin' here!"
- tempest_ 5y ago
  I don't know about New York but I live in a major city and I wonder what will happen when the homeless population figures out they can mess with them.
  - vntok 5y ago
    What is this population currently doing with cars operated by humans and how would it be any different?
    - dont__panic 5y ago
      In my city, mostly throwing glass bottles at vehicles and screaming.
    - tempest_ 5y ago
      It is not uncommon to see someone cut across the road and scream at people in cars or throw things. Depending on the driver lots of different stuff happens. Some will drive around them, others get out and confront them etc. I suspect an automated vehicle will just come to a stop an wait.
      - stevenwoo 5y ago
        Worst case, add one more person armed with a crowbar and then we have the smash and grab thieves that seem to rampant in San Francisco with a very compliant automated driver stuck behind the accomplice just standing in front of the vehicle.
    - natch 5y ago
      Envisioning a "keep summer safe" approach…
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    "Mess" with them? WDYM? I live in SF by the way.
ethnt 5y ago
Sounds more like a great reason to stay away from some of the most chaotic traffic in the US until it can be considered safer. There are far, far more pedestrians in NYC than in Phoenix, and I do not trust a Waymo car to not hit some of them.
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  In the article (only a few paragraphs btw) it specifically says the goal is to map and have safety operators manually controlling all the vehicles.
- wepple 5y ago
  When I got my NYC drivers license, the full end to end test was 8 minutes (I got a printout) on empty roads. I’d take a high quality autonomous vehicle over a tired Uber driver any day as a pedestrian
  - dml2135 5y ago
    Well I think "high quality" is doing a lot there. Obviously autonomous vehicles would be safer if they work perfectly -- the concern is that they will not.
  - ridethebike 5y ago
    Yeah, approximately 10 minutes for me to pass driving test (from second attempt). And then around a year of driving (effectively training myself) in city to get more or less comfortable with traffic.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- mpalmer 5y ago
  There are people behind the wheel.
- deegles 5y ago
  I trust a Waymo car way-more than Tesla's autopilot...
cjrp 5y ago
Sounds like a great reason to train the model on a closed road with a trained (and consenting) driver playing the role of "lane-blocking-driver" (in that example).
- natch 5y ago
  But that would take about a billion years, with all the variations and edge cases.
  - RandallBrown 5y ago
    It would take the same amount of time if they're on a closed course or in a city. The difference is you'd need to pay a lot more people to work on it.
    - natch 5y ago
      Or you could have a large fleet of a million plus instrumented vehicles gathering data as they drive, then you could use that real world data to analyze and learn from all sorts of situations.
    - _ea1k 5y ago
      Yeah, and the real world has advantages as the response of human drivers is likely more realistic. I'd bet they use this data to feed their simulators.
  - jonas21 5y ago
    They also train in simulation, where they modify real scenarios to run through variations and edge cases. [1] As of last year, they'd driven 15 billion miles in simulation - which is more than a typical person will drive in a million years. Still a ways to go to get to a billion though. [1] https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--simulation27.html https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...
    - wolverine876 5y ago
the-pigeon 5y ago
But to what end? Gathering more data on a problem you don't know how to solve won't give you a solution to solving it. We don't have any evidence to support that current AI is capable of the advanced problem solving the city driving requires.

paxys 5y ago

Every city on earth thinks their traffic is the most chaotic. Having driven around Manhattan a lot, I'd say it is probably the easiest use case for automation. Wide streets, perfect grid, slow traffic, flat, standard weather conditions, no two-way traffic lanes to cross. In fact I fail to see how this data would even be valuable to Waymo compared to what they are already getting from Phoenix and San Francisco.

ethanbond 5y ago
Yes yes, never mind the pedestrians for whom crosswalks and walk indicators are mere suggestions, or the thousands of delivery guys going 30mph on e-bikes in every possible (different from legal!) direction of travel. And while there are lots of wide, slow, neatly gridded streets, there are tons of streets that are none of those things. NYC is certainly not the most chaotic, but it’s a billion times more so than Phoenix.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  This is just east coast cities.. Something that astonished me when I moved to SF was how little people jaywalk here.
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    Correct! Functional cities have rampant jaywalking.
  - the-rc 5y ago
    It's worse than that. Not only they don't jaywalk, they stand or wander randomly all over the sidewalk/corner, getting in the way of those who are trying to get somewhere. Downtown SJ might be the winner, though. Even at noon, in broad daylight, you might not see a car for a quarter or half mile (SF is never that deserted), yet pedestrians wait for the walk signal. Craziness. At least they don't give jaywalkers the stare of disapproval you'd get in Japan.
- wolverine876 5y ago

nova22033 5y ago

A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to get ahead of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch over the line to force themselves in Is this exactly the kind of behavior that would make self-driving cars safer?

jeffbee 5y ago
It will be safer but it will also be stopped in one place for a long time, possibly forever. A driver attempting to proceed through an intersection in Manhattan needs to present a credible appearance of being willing to kill someone, otherwise the pedestrians and other cars will just block it in a continuous parade, regardless of the state of the signals. I don't really see how you can program a car to deal with that.

ddp26 5y ago

Agree, it's perplexing that Waymo thinks it makes more sense to start mapping out NYC rather than making the product work in Phoenix or SF. You could interpret this as confidence, i.e. they're so close to a working service in Phoenix/SF that they want to lay the groundwork for NYC right away. Or you could interpret is as a lack of confidence, i.e. they don't have much progress to report, and they're positioning that as "the reason we don't have a working product yet is that we're trying to solve the whole problem at once, and that's really hard."

sschueller 5y ago

As a Massachusetts driver I think it would be great to get as many of these on the road because it would be free flowing traffic for me without having to deal with people being pissed off. All the things I don't do because a human is driving I could start doing. Drive all the way to the end of a line of cars taking an exit ramp and just cut it. The waymo car will always yield. Same goes for zipper traffic, just go for it, waymo will back off. Could probably also steal a parking spot from a waymo vehicle...

wolverine876 5y ago
Imagine if Waymo had started business in Manhattan and then deployed the trained vehicles in Phoenix.

jrockway 5y ago

> As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed turns several times forcing a reroute around the block because it couldn’t change lanes because the driver in the next lane didn’t let it in. This is basically how I navigate NYC on my bike. Sometimes I can easily make a left turn, and do. Sometimes I evaluate that that's not possible, and make three rights at the next block instead. It works out in the end.

wodenokoto 5y ago

> I don’t think they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan traffic. That's why they are starting to map new york and record human driving. > Our vehicles will be manually operated by autonomous specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance our technology in support of our mission to make roads safer. They are not starting any sort of taxi service, nor are they letting the computer drive, according to the article.