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S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’
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- OhMeadhbh 3y agoHmm. I always thought these self-driving taxis were competing with regular taxis. But Cruise is saying "They also never drive distracted, drowsy or drunk," which makes me think they don't think they're competing with taxis, but with random drivers coming home from the bar at 2AM. I'm not sure I quite understand their argument here.
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- drunkbetch45 3y agoBasically in an ideal world it will significantly expanding the existing niche biking population in American cities, taking existing riders further/long (ramping up average usage) and introducing tons of new riders to the streets. But still not enough to significantly take cars off roads in a macro-context, especially considering how many people live in suburbs or city neighbourhoods which are glorified suburbs.
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- thefurdrake 3y agoI don't understand how these driverless cars don't have some sort of override for public safety officials to move them in an emergency. It seems like that would go a long way to reducing concern? Or is this just rabblerousing?
- carapace 3y agoFirst, where is the data? Second, yeah, it's bananas to test large, fast, heavy robots on public streets. The only reason we let it happen is because the robots look like cars. Third, it's bananas to have large, fast, heavy vehicles everywhere mixed in with all the other traffic. The only reason we let it happen is a mass-marketing campaign (see "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM ) Here is a film "a Trip down Market Street" recorded in San Francisco on April 14, 1906, just before the Great Earthquake. The source of the problem is clear: cars accelerate much faster than horses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8
- peterisza 3y agoI think they are training and not testing. I might be wrong, but if I am right, the use of public roads is a necessity. This is how AI works, I guess.
- peterisza 3y agoAnyone care to explain why they downvoted this?
- crote 3y agoProbably because "training" implies direct and constant supervision, which would almost completely avoid any chance of incidents because the human is in charge at all times. Deploying an unsupervised robot on the general public for training purposes is even worse than for testing purposes.
- peterisza 3y agoWhy? If it is already safer than human drivers (as they claim), training and testing are both okay. Not even just okay, but a good thing!
- 3y ago
- parl_match 3y agoI'm wary about using public roads to test these, but I think the way the data is presented is misleading. I'm not sure how it's misleading, but separating "incidents" into categories (safety, traffic, accident, etc) might be a good start. For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket. While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a safety issue at all. By the way, as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad driving), I find Uber/Lyft/Food drivers to be both much more dangerous and inconveniencing than these self driving cars. We should have scrutiny on the safety of these machines, but they're hardly the biggest problem facing SF.
- notakio 3y agoI moved out of SF ~2018, and only recently revisited, and the increased frequency with which I saw robocars was immediately concerning to me, largely based on the potential for things to go wrong, and with just how frequent they were. My second thought was, after hearing friends and family still there echo nothing for disdain for them, "how long before someone starts setting these on fire?" as some sort of nuisance campaign against the things. Turns out, 1) you don't need fire, and 2) not that long, since the cone thing started happening about a week afterwards.
- standardUser 3y agoI know this is a tired argument, but it's not wrong: There is equal or greater cause for concern with cars driven by people, we're just used to those horrors and reluctant to trade them for a different set of horrors, even if they are conclusively less horrible. I lived carless in downtown SF for 10 years, usually with a walking commute, and it was not pleasant. Packed streets full of angry, stressed drivers honking and swerving and practically revving their engines as lights change so they can gun it past cyclists and pedestrians down the next narrow street. Anyone trying to replace these agro drivers with marginally-safer robots has my support.
- more_corn 3y agoUber performed self driving car tests in downtown San Francisco for a bit. I personally saw an error where self driving cars turning right on red failed to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk who had right of way. It was a bug. The driver looped and tried again while I was standing there and it happened again. It was an incident. It was a safety incident. Getting killed by a robot breaking the rules is no less dead than if it were a human. And there’s no comfort in the thought that it might happen less often with a robot driving. Your argument that human drivers suck commits the fallacy of whataboutism. Your argument that not all incidents are safety incidents is misleading. There are safety incidents they’re unacceptable.
- damnesian 3y agoThe incidents mentioned in the story would have been shared via first responder dispatchers. Seems like the way forward here would be for the city to make this data available to all driverless cars- maybe some sort of data registration with the city- and for the vendors to make it possible to drop these new hazards into the cars' maps promptly. I don't know how these systems work, or if they can work together, but I can write a computer program and there is clearly a looping input that is lacking in this system.
- alexpotato 3y agoMapping apps (Google/Wayze) already have a reporting feature for accidents and hazards, it doesn't seem like that big a leap to either providing first responders with something like or creating some kind of gamified crowd sourced version.
- jiveturkey 3y agoMy kneejerk was to say, yeah 1->3 is a tripling. In modern journalistic terms that is 'skyrocketing'. Then I read TFA. Yep 30->90. 'skyrocketing'. That's not to say it isn't concerning. The downed wire incident that is the highlight of the story seems quite bad. But human drivers do much, much worse things, with very high frequency. Weekly sideshows, for example. The article is very unfair.
- imperialdrive 3y agoI'm on the streets of SF for hours a day, every day, mostly on bicycle. Often at night, when these AVs are at their peak output. The difference in their behavior is scary noticeable, especially within the last 30 days. I'm very curious about the programming reason behind it.
- jiveturkey 3y agoi have no basis for this guess, but i'd suppose it's more miles being driven, not a significant programming update. <checking> yep, TFA linkes to another article that there was a recent significant increase in miles driven. i guess that doesn't necessarily jibe with your perception of a noticeable difference in singular behavior, but our brains do funny things. when you buy a certain new make of car, suddenly you wonder why so many of them are on the road. (they always were)
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y agoBut in this case, everyone seems to agree that behavior changed, and data about incident reports matches it. It matches my experience too. It wasn't a subtle change. Cruise cars rapidly went from being timid and predictable to unpredictable.
- shagmin 3y agoStopped at the paywall. But is this likely a case of the number of driverless taxis skyrocketing itself, and the number of incidents per driverless taxi mile being more or less constant?
- codampa01314 3y ago> In San Francisco, those problems can mean self-driving cars blocking traffic, transit and emergency responders, as well as erratic behavior resulting in close calls with cyclists, pedestrians or other vehicles. I have mixed feelings about how to test self-driving vehicles (mostly stemming from ignorance). But at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not making progress on this (or very very slow progress)? And considering that "no one was hurt" and "driverless taxis have never killed or seriously injured anyone in the millions of miles they’ve traveled" are were now there?
- slashdev 3y agoUber’s driverless vehicle killed someone jaywalking at night in another state. So you can’t say they’ve never killed anyone. Plus Teslas have killed their own occupants plenty of times.
- bshipp 3y agoI'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated. The two decades during which human oversight of automated systems will be mandatory would be long enough for me to finish off my career getting paid to drive while I sit in a cab writing code, periodically checking over the status of my lead truck and the two or three slaved trucks following me.
- slashdev 3y agoI think there will be a strong demand for truck drivers long after most people would expect. We’re far from self driving vehicles still, and trucks will be the last to be automated, and once they are, I expect they’ll require human supervision just like you predict.
- reaperducer 3y agoI'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated. Trucks and cars are different. They've been running automated big rigs between Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso for a few years now.
- jconley 3y ago@garry did a rebuttal video to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc
- gonehome 3y agoYeah - none of this reporting can be trusted from the chronicle, the SF politics are crazy and there’s a lot of bullshit/bad-faith. I hope cruise overcomes this and the people putting traffic comes and such on the cars are stopped.
- reaperducer 3y agonone of this reporting can be trusted from the chronicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_the_messenger
- whatgoodisaroad 3y agoThis isn’t an example of shooting the messenger because you dislike the message. The SF Chronicle just has a track record of anti SF bias, then turning around and complaining about the effects of their own reporting https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/sf-downtown-doom-loop https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/sf-downtown-doom-l... It’s sadly not a trustworthy source on these matters
- gonehome 3y agoSometimes the messenger is part of the problem and not a neutral actor.
- lucisferre 3y agoWhile I was skeptical about this video and the tone it opens up with did nothing to help with that, it is actually worth a watch.
- solardev 3y agoWhat's the summary?
- somewhereoutth 3y agoGiven that in any high traffic environment driving is as much a social problem as anything else, it should be no surprise that anything short of Artificial General Intelligence cannot cope and causes disruption. Considering how little progress has been made with AGI to date, perhaps it's time to call off the self driving experiment.
- DragonStrength 3y agoI left SF a year ago but had Cruise and Waymo cars in my neighborhood constantly. They were a total nuisance. They'd jerk towards pedestrians in crosswalks leading to this uncomfortable standoff where no one in the neighborhood would ever step in front of one. I'd wager any stats here are way lower than real incidences as I was nearly hit multiple times and never got to the "report it" stage as there are so many barriers to doing so.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoI have similar experiences (as a pedestrian) crossing in front of Cruise cars, especially at 4-way stops when there aren't crosswalks explicitly drawn. It's odd because the cars are generally excruciatingly cautious, but for some reason as I'm crossing they seem to calculate exactly how fast they can take off such that they pass me right as I'm clear of their path -- whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the sidewalk before passing. What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up? But also, given that they have all those cameras, I wouldn't dare do anything "unusual" like that because it'd probably run me over and say it was my fault, and here's the proof. I don't doubt the cars' ability to calculate it exactly, but it's a different experience for sure.
- cozzyd 3y agothat sounds very harrowing. I don't think we have any of these cars in Chicago, but I'd be hesitant to push my daughter's stroller in front of one...
- Tempest1981 3y agoSounds risky. I thought California law was to let the pedestrian fully cross, but apparently not: > In California, the law does not state that a driver must wait for the pedestrian to fully exit the crosswalk or the street before they proceed on their way in their lane. A pedestrian must be safely out of the driver's path of travel for them to begin driving again.
- floren 3y ago
- dmode 3y agoI really think incidents by autonomous cars are the least of SF's problems
- shtopointo 3y agoCan anybody find the data set from which they created the graph? I tried browsing https://data.sfgov.org/browse https://data.sfgov.org/browse but there's nothing that immediately refers to "autonomous vehicles", "incidents" or the like... (I'm trying to piece the data together for myself, and I'm a bit suspicious that their graph stops in April. I'd also want to cross reference to number of vehicles on the road, because if there's been a ramp up since e.g. January, you would expect more incidents to happen).
- cwp 3y agoSan Francisco won't be satisfied until they've completely driven out all the tech companies and their employees.
- HWR_14 3y agoMaybe. I'm not sure that's a bad goal for the average SF resident.
- __loam 3y agoThe average SF resident probably works for a tech company considering how many natives have been driven out by high housing costs. Tech companies are an enormous source of tax revenue for the city and many public services quite literally depend on that revenue. One of the major issues in the city now is the city government's obstinate refusal to approve more housing development. The idea that tech workers are gentrifying one of the most expensive cities in the world is frankly absurd.
- 93po 3y agoSomething like 10% of SF works in tech.
- HWR_14 3y agoA public schoolteacher in San Francisco needs to make 30,000 a year more than they are getting paid now just to be above the poverty level. Maybe it's bad for the teachers and other people not in tech if there are that many people running around spending tons of money. But it's not a question. Most people in SF (let alone those who commute in) do not work for tech companies. Edit: Teachers need to make 25,000 a year more to no longer qualify for need-based government aid. Not 30,000.
- hedora 3y agoNote that, if prop 13 were repealed, teachers could be paid more and many houses would become available for purchase for less than current prices.
- wordsarelies 3y agoSo it's funny, when they first started rolling these out folks were interested, intrigued even. Folks walking would give them deference, mostly not run in front of them if they saw them, very unlike how they treat regular drivers. But now folks are getting sick of them. So they were modeling all their behavior and driving around cooperative pedestrians and cars (mostly) now they have to model for an adversarial public. Good fucking luck.
- valine 3y agoWould be easier to change the paint job. Just disguise them as regular taxis.
- imperialdrive 3y agoThey are MUCH more aggressive now. It used to be that if you saw one, you could be 99% sure it would stop and wait for the path to be fully clear. Now, they will buzz right by you within a foot or two. Very alarming how quickly they progressed to being careless.
- JoshTko 3y agoGoogle will optimize minimizing deaths/accidents vs maximizing trips/revenue. So it seems that buzzing closer to people is optimal for Google.
- what-no-tests 3y agoThat's the "AI Alignment" problem we've heard so much about recently.
- ajmurmann 3y agoThe AI alignment problem for a decade used to be that AGI doesn't end humanity as a side effect. Now that the mainstream has caught on, it's been diluted.
- laweijfmvo 3y agoWhat seems odd to me is that hardly anyone in SF seems to want them there (citizens, officials) yet it keeps getting pushed through?
- gonehome 3y agoI’m in SF and want them, my friends want them - we aren’t represented by the local media or reactionary politics. Same with doordash as an earlier example, endless articles about how terrible doordash and Uber are while a large percentage of people in SF use it.
- yazaddaruvala 3y agoI'm so excited for them to come to Seattle! There are many people that want them! There are even more than want 90% cheaper Ubers.
- addisonl 3y agoWouldn’t get your hopes up on it being 90% cheaper—typically Waymo cost the same or slightly more than Uber for me. Obviously the economics change as time goes on but I doubt they will make it that much cheaper.
- yazaddaruvala 3y ago> but I doubt they will make it that much cheaper. All other tech has gotten 10x cheaper across 10 years. No reason to doubt robotaxi fleets won’t as well.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoWithout the need of a driver, cars will increasingly be offered as a rental service rather than an ownership object. In a good month, the only expenses I pay for my car is gas, which is 150-200 USD. Do you think driverless car services will somehow be immune to the pressures every other rentier model (actual rent, SaaS, Netflix, etc etc etc) succumbs to?
- tinus_hn 3y agoIt would be more useful to have some actual statistics comparing this to human drivers instead of scare pieces. Because accidents did happen before.
- MontyCarloHall 3y ago>Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit. This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the mean human incident rate. Today's self-driving cars may be safer than the mean human driver, but I would wager they are far from the median human driver, and absolutely nowhere close to the top 10% of human drivers. It may be possible (but very difficult) to beat the median human with dramatic improvements to current self-driving algorithms, but beating the top 10% of human drivers will require AGI.
- minwcnt5 3y ago> I would wager they are far from the median human driver, and absolutely nowhere close to the top 10% of human drivers. I think you would likely lose that wager. In the information Waymo has published about their safety methodology, they benchmark themselves against an always-attentive driver (this already rules out most accidents), which they still outperform by a large margin. Even a driver who is never distracted doesn't have constant 360 degree vision or near-instant reaction times.
- scarmig 3y agoMean is the relevant metric, though. If it's only the bottom 10% of human drivers who cause all crashes and driverless cars are as safe as the 20p human driver, you can replace all human drivers with autonomous ones and eliminate all crashes. That's to say nothing of the fact that driverless cars will improve from their current level, and the fact that companies operating them can be held liable for crashes and forced to account for their actions in a way that the worst human drivers cannot (which provides a strong incentive for them to improve).
- cozzyd 3y agoyou can more easily prevent the bottom 10% from driving by more rigorous driving standards / more stringent revocation of licenses.
- tiahura 3y agoGPT 4 can't be trusted to set the menu for dinner without supervision, but we aren't expecting all sorts of wacky carnage by setting pre-alpha KITT loose on the streets?
- nashashmi 3y agoAt some point we will need separate emergency technologies to deal with automated vehicles as a fill in for exceptional cases. the situations described here are such cases
- martythemaniak 3y agoBeware: the State sent a letter accusing the city of manipulating data in order to make AVs looks more dangerous than they were: https://twitter.com/annatonger/status/1673403230804385813 https://twitter.com/annatonger/status/1673403230804385813 > In the 4 Waymo traffic collisions SF cited to prove driverless cars are less safe, 3 were the Waymos being rear-ended and 1 didn't even involve any cars touching, CA says. https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/K192/512192053.PDF https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/K...
- microtherion 3y ago> 3 were the Waymos being rear-ended While technically this makes them not at fault, it may represent some evidence of erratic braking behavior. Anecdotally, drivers have reported Waymo cars having a propensity for "brake checking" — not with ill intent of course, but risking accidents anyway.
- sgillen 3y agoI went ahead and read the accident reports, just because I was curious. In one case the AV was stopped at a red light when it was rear ended. In the second case AV slowed down for a person pushing a shopping cart into the street. In the third case the AV slowed down for pedestrians in a crosswalk. All the reports are in the report the person you are responding to posted. I do wish we had video footage of the events, while the first one is pretty clear cut, the other two are really dependent on what "slowing down" looks like, and what the pedestrians were actually doing.
- microtherion 3y agoThanks for the additional context. It appears that in the second case, the AV was in manual mode anyway, so whatever happened cannot possibly be attributed to autonomous driving.
- cameldrv 3y agoI've just got to say I'm so impressed with both Waymo and Cruise. Last year they did 4.5 million miles put together in California with zero fatalities. This is an incredible achievement.
- saalweachter 3y agoThe US rate is 0.57 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles.
- talldatethrow 3y agoWhile OPs statement did make me laugh a bit (I've personally driven almost a million miles myself and I don't think my odds of killing someone were 1 in 4), we do have to realize that MOST miles that make up the 100 million mile stats are done at highway speeds far away from pedestrians. If I had to do 4 million miles in SF, I just might have hit someone by now.
- 93po 3y agoWhat if you only drove at night and in very narrow corridors?
- dekhn 3y agoAmericans drove 3.2 trillion miles in 2021 and 42,795 people died in traffic fatalities (both values are estimates, and likely do not include every single mile driven or fatality that occurred, depending on how you prefer to count). So humans drive average of 74 million miles before a person gets killed, and Waymo's driven somewhere above 20M miles but probably fewer than 74M. At this point, I'd expect no self-driving car traffic fatalities, statistically, if the SDC fleet is an average driver. In some sense Waymo and Cruise are basically waiting around for a fatality (not that they want one) so they start having a denominator that isn't zero.
- saalweachter 3y agoYour statistic (vehicle miles versus passenger miles) is probably more relevant, but now I'm curious whether the passenger miles of driverless vehicles are more or less than the vehicle miles, in aggregate. (Although maybe passenger miles is the correct metric -- a driverless, passengerless vehicle could hypothetically plow into an overpass at a speed that would result in a fatality, if anyone were inside; since the passengers of a vehicle are a large chunk of the people who die if that vehicle has an accident, should we car how many people don't die when vehicles are empty?)
- satisfice 3y agoThese companies cannot be trusted to be honest about incidents or near incidents. They like to crow about safety, but the safety they want credit for is entirely hypothetical. There is no good reason to believe that autonomous vehicles are actually safer. They haven’t yet been tested enough, and the testing that has been done cannot be generalized to new situations. I believe they would be safer if all roads were fully digitized, controlled, with no pedestrians and no other human drivers. We have something like that, now, called railroads. Mass transit is the better investment.
- __loam 3y agoThey are already required to report every accident to a public agency in California. And the safety is not hypothetical. Waymo is driving millions of miles a month in places like Phoenix. They have a ton of data to support the fact that their cars are significantly safer than human drivers.
- jeffrallen 3y agoThey are not required to report incidents which have a negative impact on other road users. The SFFD is collecting that data, and it shows that these cars are not able to interact correctly with public safety vehicles and personnel.
- pms 3y agoThey are required to report every accident, but not every mile these cars drive and in what conditions, so this data is unfortunately insufficient to make valid comparisons with human drivers... Really, the problem is the transparency of tech companies. If self-driving cars are really safer, then tech companies need to prove it by releasing more data than necessary, rather than less!
- __loam 3y agoThey are actively sharing this data with the relevant regulatory authorities.
- deleted 3y ago
- jarjoura 3y agoLaws are written and designed for humans who constantly try to push it to the limit and get away with things. These cars are all over the place and I've been caught stuck on a street in Bernal Heights because it couldn't quite fit and just froze in place. I had to back out of the street because there wasn't any room for me to go around it. Yes it may be following laws to the letter, but not only was I grumpy about having to carefully back out of a street, there wasn't any way to communicate with the car. It doesn't have any feedback mechanism for me, so it just looks like a confused dead robot in the middle of the street. I think Waymo and Cruise are both happily working on hard problems in this space with limitless VC funding (or daddy GM money) thrown their way. So I support their efforts, because at the very least, they'll enrich our understanding of self-driving cars even if it were to fail in the marketplace long term. I'm curious how profitable it will be in practice once the VC money dries up. Paying half a million dollar salaries to employees who need to keep these things up to date adds up. That, on top of hardware costs for precise sensors that will fail fast in harsh weather conditions. On top of normal wear and tear of people in and out of the cars all day for cars that won't need down time. Lastly, I'll end my thoughts with this... why are we obsessed with the idea of self driving cars anyway?! What human problem does this solve? I am 100% on board with building autonomous cruise-control for my own car, so I'm not against the tech. I just find the taxi angle to be weird. All I see so far in my mind is a product that just takes away an entire class of job opportunities with no actual gain.
- pawelmurias 3y agoWe can drive people and goods around without having a human waste his time driving stuff around. Not wasting money paying people to do stupid stuff is gigantic gain.
- jarjoura 3y agoThe person the tech is replacing will still need to work and earn a wage to afford the goods the system that replaced them is delivering. It's not replacing a relatively high risk job or allowing that driver to scale themselves and improve their efficiency in any way. It's just eliminating their job, because. As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having someone in the car who might improve the journey slightly by being an interesting person to chat with, I'll likely sit in the car all alone. Worse, I'll probably be shoved ads in my face. So, this new taxi doesn't really add anything new of value to me as a consumer. I know automated systems have replaced all kinds of jobs, and the closest analogy I can think of is self-check out lines at grocery stores, or ATM machines before that. However, those actually did free up cashiers so they could wander the store and help out in other ways, or restock, or funny enough, help someone self-check out. Taxis are kind of an island to themselves, and not only will this impact the driver who won't have anything related to jump to, it will hurt the businesses who rely on drivers waiting for the next passenger. Then there's the urban centers these cars are zipping around in. These cars have no employee to generate business tax revenue from, so the cars are consuming infrastructure for no benefit to the cities. Anyway, thanks for reading my random thoughts. I'm sure things will balance out in the end, but if you work in the industry and have some cool insights, feel free to share.
- dekhn 3y ago"Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as possible. When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents. Remember: reality is banal. Things are far better explained by sampling error, bias, and base rates, than they are by sudden, dramatic shifts caused by a single factor.
- seadan83 3y agoFor the data we have, year on year increase of 30x, from 3 to 90, is not enough orders of magnitude for you to object saying "sky rocket" - that you call it a scare campaign? It is part of the point the city is missing data, these AI car companies have not been transparent with what they know.
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- seadan83 3y agoTrying to engage more constructively... Do you think that this is essentially a scare-piece (and is no way supported by the relatively limited data that is available [which is a concern in of itself])? Second question, what if the word 'skyrocket' were replaced with 'increased', would that change your perspective?
- justsomehnguy 3y agoYep 200% increase is 'skyrocketing'. Even if means what 1 became 3.
- babl-yc 3y agoThe SF Chronicle has an unfortunate habit of headlines telling you "what to feel" as opposed to "what happened".
- LispSporks22 3y agoI'm with ya normally, but literally a few paragraphs in they have the chart source: the TA, going from 3 to 91 "incidents" over a year. If you turn it on its side, it kinda looks like rocket blasting off.
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- collegeburner 3y agookay now let's look at "per capita" stats. how many more cars are running? the fact that sf chronicle is even running this without actual info is kinda silly. maybe they're not safe but hard to assess without knowing that.
- _xivi 3y agoMy stance have shifted a bit lately, from "concerns/what ifs" to "let's see", I began to look at it through "the sooner the better" lenses. Advancements like these are inevitable and have been on the radar for a long time. The more people familiar and informed about the tech, the better they are equipped in order to put the right regulations.
- alasarmas 3y agohttps://archive.li/jpVut https://archive.li/jpVut
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jhatemyjob 3y agoI miss Uber pool. It was $5 for a ride across town and it was a great way to meet people. Why do we need this self driving Taxi shit? Would much prefer my own car to have that functionality than to rent it out on a per-ride basis
- BirAdam 3y agoI think it depends upon the person. Owning a car is very expensive and many would rather not if they only need it once or twice each month. Others, like myself, need a vehicle almost every single day. I will definitely prefer to own one.
- jacobsenscott 3y ago> Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records Also, Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records. I'll believe the city officials in this case, since they actually have some data. The car companies just have hand waves.
- scarmig 3y ago> Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records. This is not true. They monthly release accidents and disengagement reports to the state. SF officials, on the other hand, have been caught more or less fabricating a story and misusing data. From the Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the process and AV companies are required to report all incidents to: > Regarding collision responsibility, San Francisco’s analysis appears to omit or overlook relevant facts present in the data and collision narratives that are critical for understanding the context of the cited incidents. The examples of two injury collisions upon which it seems San Francisco bases its analysis of Waymo’s relative injury collision rate (included below in Appendix A as entries for June 2022 and July 2022) are problematic in this regard. According to Waymo’s account as submitted to NHTSA, the June 2022 collision does not appear to involve any contact with the Waymo AV. indicates the Waymo AV was rear-ended by another vehicle, which immediately left the scene. Note that no determination of fault, of the AV or otherwise, is evident through these reports. (https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/K192/512192053.PDF https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M512/K...)
- m00x 3y agoThey include incidents where the car has caused traffic disruption. Recently, people have been throwing cones on top of the cars causing them to stop and impede traffic. This includes SF city officials, which is wild. Look for #weekofcone on Twitter.
- benatkin 3y agoIncidents of me posting the 1337th prime to Hacker News are skyrocketing. 11027
- what-no-tests 3y agoI worked as a software engineering tech lead on the "Ground Truth" team at GM Cruise for a short period in 2018. During orientation, the founder (Kyle Vogt) told us all that the cars don't need to be better than a human driver, they only need to be "not worse" than a human driver. In fact, when questioned about it, he said that the sooner we could get robot cars on the streets of SF the sooner the software could improve. The idea was that the more dangerous, "not worse than a human" era would be a necessary sacrifice of safety (compared to waiting forever until we had 100% perfect driving robot cars) -- so we could fast-forward to major improvements in the robot cars' capabilities. That (IMO) cavalier attitude, a lack of rigor in the way software for the vehicles was being developed, and the fact that we had constant meetings about "diversity and inclusion" rather than on robustness, safety, ethics and quality pushed me to resign abruptly and go my own way. Very disappointing experience - as I had hoped to see "The Future" before joining GM Cruise and even a fat paycheck and RSUs weren't enough to sooth my scruples.
- efitz 3y agoI am on my 3rd Tesla- been driving them since 2015- and frequently use FSD beta. I’ve watched autopilot develop into FSD. The thing that baffles me about all current autonomous vehicle efforts is how resistant they are to having any sort of environmental feedback engineered specifically to help driverless cars. For instance, in addition to flashing lights, what if fire trucks broadcast a “keep away” radio signal? Perhaps engineered specifically to be easy to determine distance and direction. Perhaps driverless car companies would have to pitch in to pay for the transponder refit for every fire truck. This is just an idea from a layperson and probably unworkable in this form but you should get the drift of my suggestion. Also, reading this story, why didn’t the city place orange cones in addition to caution tape? I seriously doubt any driverless car company is training their vehicles on caution tape; as a driver for 40 years I have never encountered caution tape in a way to influence my driving. If the city is allowing driverless cars maybe they should have rudimentary training and standards for personnel to avoid unsafe situations. Ditto for the firemen and fire hoses - ORANGE CONES are what tells me not to drive somewhere.
- 93po 3y agoAnything other than vision from cameras for self-driving is the wrong way to approach it. The vision capabilities of these cars has to be advanced enough to recognize and respond to the unknown and unexpected, to work even where roads have changed overnight, to work in adverse conditions where it's hard to see, etc. Recognizing emergency vehicles is very far down on the list of difficult things to do, and is not difficult at all compared to many other challenges. Having transponders is just another thing to do fail, or to forget to turn on, or to be impacted by other things, or to give false positives, or to be abused by drivers, etc. Really nothing can be relied upon other than what you see.
- hedora 3y agoThere are laws regarding traffic markers. Cities can’t just do arbitrarily obscure things and expect drivers to figure out what they want. One could easily argue that the liability associated with hitting caution tape is just the cost of replacing the caution tape itself (and not additional fines for driving through whatever poorly marked area you went into).
- adamkf 3y agoIn my experience living in SF, these cars are much safer than the typical drivers in my neighborhood for pedestrians. Most human drivers around here don't even bother to stop at stop signs, and instead just slow slightly. With the cruise and Waymo cars, I feel like the risk is a bit lower when I'm on my bike or walking. I have witnessed a Cruise car stopping in the middle of the road when faced with an oncoming emergency vehicle, so I totally buy that they aren't ready for prime time yet. Honestly, I'd prefer if we prioritized enforcing existing traffic laws for regular vehicles.
- kaycebasques 3y agoI live in "the outside lands" [1] so I see them all the time. I think they do a lot of testing out here. I can only think of one time that a Cruise acted erratically and put me on guard. But honestly they drive so gradually and predictably that I am confident I could have got out of the way. I don't recall a single sketchy moment with a Waymo, but I'm a Googler so maybe we just chalk that up as incentivized blindspot and render that as inadmissible in the court of HN. On the other hand, every day I see human drivers needlessly endangering themselves and others. Every. Single. Day. Maybe the equation changes with more robo-drivers and less human drivers. I would take the other side of that bet any day. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Lands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Lands
- runeb 3y agoI moved here from Europe and I am absolutely shocked at how reckless the drivers are. In the old country I think I saw a car run a red light once in 20 years of driving. Here is seems I see it every other day.
- koheripbal 3y ago"Europe" is very vague when it comes to driving. Italy and Greece and all of eastern Europe have some of the worse (aggressive) driving on earth.
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- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y agoEveryone's complaining that the number of total incidents is still small, but the change in those mirrors my own experience driving near those cars, which does not show up in the small number of worst incidents. Meaning the small, but rapidly growing data in the article reflects just the tip of the iceberg. About the time that the graph shows incidents blowing up, the cruise at least went from a cool thing to drive near to a very unpredictable thing that would act up every time I was near one (which was daily). For each of those ~100/mo reported incidents, there's surely a ton more going unreported, and even more non-'incident' nuisances. Which seem to be skyrocketing as well.
- stellalo 3y agoI’m not sure looking at the absolute number of incidents is very informative. How did the total number of miles-per-day from autonomous vehicles vary in the same timespan?
- fnord77 3y agothe SF government has already been caught lying about this. this is a threat to transit fiefdoms. this is what it boils down to
- fragmede 3y agoI will provide a dissenting voice. I was riding a Cruise with a friend the other night, leaving a bar - they only serve a nighttime crowd right now. suddenly a drunk hippie on Haight street started banging on the windows. Rather than get on our way and get us out of there like a Homan driver would, the cruise stopped, powered down - as in unlocked the doors, and called customer service. I shudder to think what would have happened if the hippie hadn't been drunk/inconsequentially high and was on PCP or something. This was a real thing that happened. I reported it to customer support. I can only imagine the conversations internally of this incident. (maybe I should get a job as an sre there.)
- AlexandrB 3y agoThere's also the other possibility that it's a firefighter banging on the doors, trying to stop the car from driving into a dangerous area. I'd argue that's the more dangerous scenario too. PCP doesn't magically turn someone into a maniacal killer.
- BirAdam 3y agoNow that you mention it, this makes me think of all kinds of edge cases and how SDCs should handle them, and how they would detect them... hard problems. Of course, it seems like we humans are requiring the SDCs to be better than we are and not be our equals. I am not sure why. I do not know if that standard is good or bad; just making an observation. For example, a person could be banging on a window screaming for help. Many people would just speed away, some would stop and try to help, and in a few places in this country such aggressive behavior could get the person screaming for help killed.
- cypress66 3y agoYeah. That's why I much prefer an L4 car that you still own and sit in the driver seat with steering wheel, than a taxi I rent and have no control over. (obviously there's no such L4 car yet, but I'm sure tesla/mobileye/etc will get there eventually) If you're not going to have a steering wheel, then you should have a "keep summer safe" mode.
- worik 3y agoI lost count of how many times there was a comment about a lack of data > The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled. > city transportation leaders this time around informally collect their own incident data using 911 and 311 calls > Friedlander said the city can’t make definitive conclusions because it doesn’t have detailed data. Yet Google and GM say things like > “Every single day of delay in deploying this life-saving autonomous driving technology has critical impacts on road safety,” Waymo said in a statement. On the face of it Google and GM are lying
- km3r 3y agoOr Google and GM have the data, but aren't sharing it because people will overreact because despite it being an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, it still has some incidents that people will focus in on.
- bhelkey 3y agoCalifornia law requires all accidents of autonomous cars resulting in "property damage, bodily injury, or death" be reported within ten days. All of this accident data is publicly available with details about every accident. For example, Waymo had four accidents in May and four accidents in June. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-vehicle-collision-reports/#:~:text=As%20of%20June%2027%2C%202023,and%20are%20available%20upon%20request https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto....
- pms 3y agoSounds like an extremely arrogant and biased comment showing the blind righteousness of tech and its followers. How else can tech build trust with the public than via transparency? Think about this for a moment.
- cowpig 3y agoThat doesn't sound plausible to me. If it were demonstrably safer they would surely be transparent about that
- pier25 3y agoIt's amazing after all the billions they've thrown into autonomous driving that it's still isn't a solved problem. Must be an extremely hard problem.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoPeople are putting cones on top of the cars so that they get stuck.
- atkailash 3y ago[dead]
- kristopolous 3y agoIs it normalized data? I'm guessing a huge no
- lacrimacida 3y agoI’ll get really pissed if i get run over by a robotaxy (and if I survive of course) but who gets the blame? And is this being equivalent to being harmed by robots? What the hell have we done and what the hell are we searching for, we already have people who could, need and should be doing those jobs. Most likely technology will get there but it better be tested and retested for decades before being widely adopted.
- aluminum96 3y agoI feel like I'm being gaslit by the AV companies, especially Cruise. If these cars are so safe, why do I constantly seem them doing sketchy stuff on public roads? Why are there so many videos on Twitter and Reddit of pedestrians literally dodging out of the way to avoid being run over? It doesn't pass the smell test.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> Why are there so many videos on Twitter and Reddit of pedestrians literally dodging out of the way to avoid being run over? Part of the answer here is probably "because no one bothers to film human drivers doing this, as it's commonplace".
- aluminum96 3y agoI'm sure there is a selection bias. But if AVs are really an improvement, Cruise should prove it to the CPUC with actual data. Otherwise, I'll continue to believe outrageous videos [like this](https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368 https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368) over Cruise's claims.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI feel like this argument just needs to stop. If you're designing planes, they shouldn't just be doing a bit of casual swerving towards the terminal during taxing. We're engineering solutions, not making kind of working stuff.
- jononomo 3y agoAI is going to cause human extinction by turning us all into paper clips even though it can't drive a car.
- gnicholas 3y agoIs this what Garry Tan's video (The Truth and Lies About Driverless Cars in SF [1]) was all about? I find him to be pretty credible in general, and he makes a strong case that there are some folks within the city government who are misrepresenting the safety record of self-driving cars. I don't know much about the situation, and I'm glad this testing isn't happening where I live (we do have tons of testing on the peninsula, but it's with humans in the vehicle). But I think it's important for companies and regulators to be honest about what is happening, whichever way the facts come out. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc
- kaycebasques 3y agoTangential: This article made me curious about who owns the Chronicle these days. Looks like it's the Hearst family now [1] which is amusing because I'm pretty sure the Examiner and the Chronicle used to be sworn archenemies back in the 1800s. The Hearsts owned the Examiner back then. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Chronicle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Chronicle
- oars 3y agoThank you for sharing this video.
- sailfast 3y agoNow present the data in incidents per vehicle mile and compare it to human drivers please? Very difficult to take anything seriously that doesn't compare this technology to humans when it comes to safety. We're terrible drivers on the whole.
- bandrami 3y agoIs this one of those "400% increase from 2 to 10" things?
- perryizgr8 3y agoWhat's the problem that autonomous cars aim to solve? Almost everybody today is able to drive. Most people are safely navigating billions of kilometers everyday. People who are physically disabled or don't want to drive for whatever reason have the option to order an Uber. So what is it that will change if we attain a 100% human-like AI driver?
- wskinner 3y agoAlmost 43,000 people died in car accidents in the USA in 2022. Many people hope autonomous cars can reduce that number. The goal is not a 100% human-like driver. It is a driver that is better than humans.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoIts okay if a few people die as long as Big Tech gets to gobble up more of our lives and make a few more billion in profits.
- Ycdr4thfdd 3y agoYes, a few people will die. More than a few. But I would bet anything that even in the short-term, and especially in the long-term, far fewer will die than if there were human drivers in those cars.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoI’d still much rather be killed by a fellow human than a corporation controlled entity. “Greater good” has been the excuse for some astonishingly bad ideas.
- 93po 3y agoOver a million people a year die from traffic related incidents. It's arguably the most dangerous things many people do aside from poor diets and smoking. We need to bring this number down, and quickly. It's not going to happen as long as humans are driving.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoAgree, but the solution can't involve giving away autonomy to private corporations.
- FreshStart 3y agoEh, if driverless vehicles are between rides and not parked, could police ticket them for cruising?
- ekianjo 3y agoCould be summarized by a better title being SF says bullshit as usual
- exabrial 3y agoMove fast and break things?
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoMove fast and break human bodies!
- Roark66 3y agoI'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to putting an AI in charge with no manual override of a 3 ton vehicle with humans on board, but having said that, this article didn't provide any meaningful information if these "incidents" per mile driven are higher compared with human drivers? They say they saw "huge increase in incidents". Perhaps there was a "huge" increase in miles driven by these cars? It is possible likely hood of such incidents per car/mile increased due to a software update or tweaking of some parameters. I heard people often complain self driving cars drive too cautiously. Try to address this, it is pretty certain there will be more incidents. But is it what happened here? We have no idea. In general I feel the quality of journalist output diminishes in time, or perhaps it was always horrible? How can one do research, spend time talking to people, write an article and don't provide basic numbers?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- johanneskanybal 3y agoBizzare that they are not required to provide data to the city if that’s needed.
- kotaKat 3y agoThe easiest solution is to just pull Cruise's licenses because they've been and continue to be the worst offender -- the only reason they got significantly faster approval than Waymo to do things even more autonomously was because they're GM and leveraged their massive lobbying power to get away with breaking shit in production.
- KETpXDDzR 3y agoDriverless cars are probably safer in the US, because ppl here suck at driving :) In Germany you have to take driving lessons with professional instructors, including highway and night drives. The driving test in the US is ridiculously easy. You don't even need to be able to reverse-park.