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San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming
- jmclnx 3y agoWith these driverless cabs, will a person still be behind the wheel ? Or is no one there. If not, what happens if an accident occurs and the cab keeps on driving due to a software bug ?
- z0mghii 3y agoThere's already driverless cabs with no one behind the wheel running. Just not 24/7. If some accident or bug occurs, they currently just stop completely until a person comes out
- jeffbee 3y agoWaymo already operates around the clock. Their application to CPUC will only allow them to charge for the service.
- medellin 3y agoHopefully they had the foresight to test this.
- kfarr 3y agoNo one is behind the wheel. Right now there is no mechanism for a third party such as law enforcement to reliably stop or redirect the vehicle.* Yes, it is possible that an issue could occur and the vehicle will keep driving.* * you could say the same thing about human motor vehicle operators
- cmgbhm 3y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/12/san-francisco-robotaxi-hinder-emergency-crews-shooting https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/12/san-franc... While this one is unique afaik, there are plenty of other odd ball ones.
- zaptrem 3y agoIn the extremely unlikely event this happens and the AV doesn’t pull over the footage is saved for a time so the other driver/pedestrian/etc can simply contact the company/police for insurance claims.
- meowkit 3y agoThere are multiple failsafes to prevent a “keeps on driving from a software bug”. There are overseers who are remotely monitoring vehicle telemetry. If there is an accident, the company will know before anyone else and will respond accordingly.
- sbuttgereit 3y agoDriving my kid to/from school in San Francisco, I regularly see completely empty Waymo cars driving around... pretty much every day. There's 1-3 that I see parked on a particular wide and relatively empty side street and I suspect they use that street to wait until they have a destination.
- malermeister 3y agoIndividual motorized transport is a dead end, especially in cities, no matter if it has a driver or not. It's just inherently energy- and space efficient to haul around a two ton piece of junk per 80kg person. Cities don't have the space, the planet doesn't have the energy to support it. We need to ban cars from cities in the longer term, both human- and AI-driven. For now, we need to take steps to get there. Reduce car lanes, increase bike lanes. Build out public transit.
- chpatrick 3y agoI think that ship sailed in many parts of the US when cities were built around cars.
- malermeister 3y agoUS cities weren't built around cars, they were bulldozed for them. https://historydaily.org/america-streets-before-cars https://historydaily.org/america-streets-before-cars We can undo the damage.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoI am with you on personal automobiles which take up enormous amounts of space on our streets per rider, even when every seat is filled. That doesn't mean individualized urban motor transport is a dead end: there are still E-bikes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- olyjohn 3y agoHow did you know the Tesla auto braked? Did you talk to the driver?
- spaceman_2020 3y ago…and hope that climate change makes the weather nice enough for bikes and walking all the year round!
- jseliger 3y agoI think this is just complacency and a bias towards how things are; imagine a world in which biking is safe, pedestrians are safe, and huge amounts of the city don't have to be devoted to parking. That's what 24/7 driverless cars can enable.
- malermeister 3y agoIn this world, we'll still have giant hunks of steel zooming around our cities, creating noise, taking up space and wasting energy to move themselves around (the payload to weight ratio of cars is abysmal). We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoWhat do you suggest people do when the weather isn’t quite as nice? Where I live, it gets so brutally hot and humid in the summer that people literally collapse and die if they do anything much outdoors.
- ZanyProgrammer 3y agoSan Francisco is not like that though. that's the whole point of the article. They could also take transit.
- minwcnt5 3y agoSF despite being dense and having high transit ridership for a US city is still fairly car oriented. If the endpoints of your trip are not near Muni/BART station it's going to take twice as long on transit. And the hills can make the walking part difficult for people who are elderly, disabled, or need to transport items.
- gWPVhyxPHqvk 3y agoThat sounds like a place not suitable for human life.
- moffkalast 3y agoIt's called Waymo because there's way mo edge cases than they expected, ayoo
- mynonameaccount 3y agowhat if a thug stayed in the car an robbed every new rider? What if the homeless camped in the car?
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- LeafItAlone 3y agoWhy couldn’t it drive that person to a police station for the criminal or a suitable place for the homeless person? Certainly they detect when anybody is in the car.
- candiodari 3y agoWhilst the city doesn't control the laws here, they control the police. So if the city intends to sabotage self driving cars? They'd lock the car down for illegal parking when arriving at the police station.
- the_snooze 3y agoThe first night these are driving around, a homeless person or a drugged up techbro will turn a car into an expensive autonomous outhouse.
- DaveJorg 3y agoGood point, valid concern. It’s assumed you need to pay to enter the vehicle and this is tied to your credit card. Could the system be setup so you are charged until you exit the vehicle and your trip doesn’t end until you do? Cameras or presence sensors could detect when the occupant enters or leaves the vehicle.
- MostlyStable 3y agoIt's entirely possible that this tech isn't yet ready for an expansion, but this article does a shit job of demonstrating that. The alternative is not perfect drivers. The alternative is real human drivers who make all kinds of mistakes every day. I completely believe that these incidents are real, but without comparison to the actual alternative, it's useless information.
- mlyle 3y agoMy guess is that the self-driving cars are a bit safer against injury/death per mile (we don't have enough data to know either way), but make stupid mistakes that inconvenience emergency services a lot more. But we don't know how to make human drivers any better, and self-driving cars are steadily improving (even if that's slowing down a little).
- LeafItAlone 3y ago> make stupid mistakes that inconvenience emergency services a lot more Maybe. But human drivers already do this way more than I would expect. I’ve seen emergency vehicles stopped and blocked by human drivers who are either paralyzed with uncertainty of what to do or selfishness (no way of knowing what’s going through their minds).
- mlyle 3y agoThey're both guesses based on incomplete data. But it sure looks like self-driving cars are still a fair bit worse on the second. The whole "fail safe" thing is great for overall safety but bad for doing something reasonable in these edge situations.
- jonas21 3y ago> But it sure looks like self-driving cars are still a fair bit worse on the second. How so? We hear about the self-driving car incidents because they're required to write up reports whenever something happens (and it also makes for a good news story). That's not the case with human drivers.
- supermatt 3y agoThey should simply be held to the same standard as any other road user. Whoever is ultimately responsible for these cars should also be responsible for the traffic offenses. Prosecute them. Revoke their drivers license. Impound the vehicles. Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.
- mlyle 3y ago> Revoke their drivers license. Impound the vehicles. > Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike. OK, well, ... surely we need to have some kind of not-exactly-equal treatment. If I commit 4 traffic offenses in a year, I'll get a suspended license. If Google commits 4 traffic offenses in a year across, say, 5,000 cars and 50,000 vehicle hours, they probably should not have operations suspended.
- WrtCdEvrydy 3y agoWhy not? It's the same code across all the cars... it's as if you had a clone factory making clones of driver you.
- mlyle 3y agoI kind of hope you're joking, but just in case you're not I'll explain. Because if I make a mistake every 3000 hours of driving, that's a mistake every 5-10 years. I am allowed to continue driving by the law. If Waymo makes a mistake every 6000 hours of driving, and drives 50,000 hours per year, that's 8 per year. Said system would be twice as safe as me but would pretty much immediately get suspended if it's treated as "one driver."
- minwcnt5 3y agoUnder this logic, twins would share the same drivers license. :)
- supermatt 3y agoWhy? Full-time professional drivers are subject to the same rules as casual drivers. They should program them not to perform traffic offenses.
- LeafItAlone 3y agoThat first paragraph sounds _exactly_ like what I’ve seen human drivers do. All of the incidents in the article are. Sure, wet should strive for bettering the situation with automated technology, but it’s not like this is worsening the status quo.
- xdfil 3y ago[dead]
- fairity 3y agoI took one of these in Phoenix, and realized how easy it would be to rob/kidnap/assault someone in a SDC. If you simply surround the car on all four sides, the car will refuse to move. All it would take is 4 thugs to surround the vehicle and you would have to give up all your belongings. In the current world, you’d just run one of them over but that’s not an option in SDC’s. This combined with the fact that the cars are easily identifiable and trackable via the app seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I'm not sure what you could do other than arming vehicles.
- minwcnt5 3y agoThere are probably much less risky targets to rob/kidnap than someone who's inside a metal box of cameras that's monitored by remote operators able to dispatch police.
- beardyw 3y agoFor what it's worth I would rather be run over by a stupid person than a stupid machine. At least if I survived I could learn to forgive a person.
- bigmattystyles 3y agoI don’t know what to think about my gut reactions anymore. I guess that’s a good thing, but for instance, when bird type scooters came out and the city wanted to regulate, I thought the city council to be a bunch of luddites expecting a cut somehow. Fast forward 7 years or so and those things litter the sidewalks, people ride them very dangerously and sometimes even block handicap pathways or emergency egress. I felt the same way about them trying to clamp down on those FB/Apple/… employee buses and their use of city streets to pick up and drop off employees. I still thought that one was weird as they got more cars off the roads than anything else.
- minwcnt5 3y agoThere are hundreds of these driving around SF 24/7 already, and they're highly visible, so I'm not convinced they actually have issues at a higher rate than humans. Any time something unusual happens with them it's almost guaranteed to make the news. And a few times the initial knee-jerk reaction turns out to be wrong. I wonder if this whole narrative that AVs are ruining SF is going to go away after they actually get approval. I haven't heard of any protest or outrage in Phoenix, where they've had Waymo for a while now.
- ChatGTP 3y agoIt's really hard to believe how much of America a few companies will own. The Internet, advertisement, transport, AI like...can anything stop Google?
- computing 3y agoThe SF dilemma: - can’t own a car because expensive, no parking, will get broken into - can’t use a bike because roads are dangerous for bikers and bike will get stolen if parked outside - can’t use uber/lyft because expensive, companies abuse drivers - can’t use public transport, because it doesn’t cover enough of the city, timetable unpredictable, can be dangerous or unpleasant - can’t use self-driving cars, because they occasionally interfere with public services, are run by big tech
- nicolashahn 3y agoThe thing is you can use all of these for different use cases. I have a car which I take to anywhere I can park easily (which is a lot of places in the city if you avoid downtown). I don't own a bike but I know many who do, and just take it inside with them. Roads are dangerous for bikers but not moreso than every other city in the country. I use uber/lyft only when I know I'm not going to be sober, which isn't that often (once a weekish). Plenty of people I know use public transit, though only some routes are useful/safe. Self driving cars are still very early days and I'm sure they'll work out the technical issues. The fact that they're owned by big tech isn't a problem for me and most other people.