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"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

• seadan83 3y ago
  For 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.
• deleted 3y ago
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• seadan83 3y ago
  Trying 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 ago
  Yep 200% increase is 'skyrocketing'. Even if means what 1 became 3.
• babl-yc 3y ago
  The SF Chronicle has an unfortunate habit of headlines telling you "what to feel" as opposed to "what happened".
• LispSporks22 3y ago
  I'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.
  • dekhn 3y ago
    That's not a rocket blasting off, it's a rocket failing to reach orbit by barely clearing the launch platform. More importantly: that chart isn't normalized by miles driven. As the companies have been ramping up, you'd expect (under a random model) that incidents would go up. It could also be explained by greater knowledge of SDCs, increased news coverage, and more awareness of how to report incidents. More importantly, I wasn't considering the chart, I was considering what the source of the quote said: Julia Friedlander, SFMTA’s senior manager of automated driving policy, told state regulators in late June that driverless taxi incidents began “skyrocketing” this year. Though city leaders suspect it coincides with a rise in driverless activity, Friedlander said the city can’t make definitive conclusions because it doesn’t have detailed data.
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      If you have alternate information, it's better to offer it than to describe what it could look like hypothetically.
    • mediumdeviation 3y ago
      Per mile incident rate is a measure only the companies care about. Why wouldn't the city care about an increase in the total number of traffic incidents? Especially when the self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at the end of the day the roads are getting less safe.
      • gruez 3y ago
        >Especially when the self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at the end of the day the roads are getting less safe. what makes you think that? "Driverless taxis" imply they're being used to transport passengers. A robotaxi taking a fare means that there isn't a human taxi taking the same fare, so human drivers are essentially being displaced.
• NickM 3y ago
  When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". The article actually has quantitative data that shows reports of "incidents where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit and emergency responders" rising by a couple orders of magnitude in a year. Yeah, the city officials have to cover their asses and make disclaimers about what they can and cannot conclude, because all they know is that they're getting more reports of incidents; they don't have access to Waymo's data. But given that we know driverless car activity has increased substantially, it seems silly to assume that it must just be a random coincidence that people are now reporting correspondingly more problems.
  • gruez 3y ago
    >"incidents where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit and emergency responders" rising by a couple orders of magnitude in a year. Right, but how much is that in absolute terms? If last year you had 0 incidents, and this year you had 1, that's an infinity% increase.
    • NickM 3y ago
      If you actually look at the article, it has the numbers in absolute terms. In April '22 (the earliest month on the chart) there were 3 reports. Following that, we have something that looks like an exponential curve leading to a year later where it's nearly 100 per month. We can split hairs all day about what constitutes an order of magnitude or what percentage increases mean or whatever, but this doesn't appear to just be statistical noise.
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      There's a chart at this link: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/driverless-taxi-cruise-waymo-18157172.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/driverless-taxi-cruis... that shows incidents going from 3 to 91 during April '22 to April '23.
  • dekhn 3y ago
    I dojn't think that chart represents anything informative. It's at least partly based on "social media reports" and they say it's "incomplete". Any number of alternative explanations for that chart (which isn't a "skyrocket") explain the results better, such as increased awareness of the cars, increased numbers of miles driven (so the complaint rate per mile is roughly constant), and negative press coverage of incidents.
• throwaway9274 3y ago
  Absolutely right. To situate in terms of recent events, there have been three stages of trying to delay / influence the California CPUC robotaxi expansion approval vote: 1. Tried a politician scare campaign. Failed because it was too transparent it was an attempted distraction from their terrible public safety record. 2. Tried coning and disabling the vehicles. Failed because it was too transparently astroturfed, legal liability. 3. Now attempting leaks of cherry-picked vanity metrics so massaged they can’t fairly be called “statistics” to friendly anti-tech local media. Will fail because national and international media no longer trust our local journalists, and will investigate independently. The cars work. The incident data meets the standards set forth by the state of California. Local politicians need to find another anti-tech boogeyman. This one is too vital to the revitalization of SF. I am not talking my book, have zero stake here. It’s just saddening to watch a nascent technology finally start working well and then get kneecapped by political games.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • Loughla 3y ago
    My take is that this isn't so much about privately owned cars and/or taxis, but the real politics is in over the road trucking, and these incremental steps are just part of that. If self driving over the road trucking happens (and that's sort of inevitable), politicians seem to legitimately believe it will collapse our economy. It seems like all self-driving anything gets lumped in with that.
    • arebop 3y ago
      I suspect this is why the road trucking divisions have been deprioritized at companies such as Waymo. The truck-drivers are better organized than the cabbies+ridesharing drivers, so even if highway driving is technically easier it is politically less feasible. I suppose it could just be that intrastate trucking is too small of an opportunity and interstate trucking obviously requires lobbying in multiple contiguous states.
    • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
• Zetice 3y ago
  Am I reading the graph wrong? a 3x increase over one month that sustains into the next month qualifies as "skyrocketing" to me...
  • dekhn 3y ago
    I've commented elsewhere I don't think the chart is informative (and listed several good reasons why). But all you're describing is a 300% increase, not several orders of magnitude increase. If you look at Google's QPS chart (maintained in crayon by the original engineers!) you will see that they frequently had to rescale the chart by factors of ten because their growth rate in the early days was exponential. The chart is not an example of exponential growth.
    • Zetice 3y ago
      Exponential growth, several orders of magnitude... these are not what "skyrocketing" means, in actuality. So you are correct, none of those phrases describe the graph here, but none of those phrases matter. It's a sudden, alarming, and seemingly sustained trend, and it's worth writing an article over.
      • dekhn 3y ago
        Have you ever looked at the chart of the velocity of a rocket? Rockets accelerate from 0 to 17,000 mph in ~5-6 minutes. the initial phase is exponential. (it's not useful being pedantic here, I think I've captured what people think when they hear the word "skyrocket"; it's intentionally used to frame the discussion)
        • Zetice 3y ago
          Now imagine making a chart that adds a 100x multiplier to that rocket's data! Only that chart now can be called "skyrocketing" then, because it dwarfs the rocket's original data... The fact that more "skyrocketing" things exist doesn't invalidate that the word "skyrocketing" could apply to what's presented here, and it does accurately frame the discussion around the sudden, alarming trend of self driving car incidents over time. The various causes of the data jump/spike/skyrocket/whatever are fairly discussed in the article, and based on what's there it seems reasonable to conclude that there are much more complicated forces at play here other than, "self driving cars bad". The chart illustrates the sudden change, but explicitly tries to provide a number of very different possible explanations for the data.
• hosh 3y ago
  There may not be data to support this, but on the other hand, informal perceptions -- even if unsupported by data -- matters a great deal with products and systems. But I would ask the people living there what they perceive, not just relying on a news reporter.
  • dekhn 3y ago
    informal perceptions are about the last thing you want when making decisions about large-scale technology roll-outs. Instead, people should be informed with the highest quality data, and need to be reminded that informal perceptions are often biased and skewed.
    • hosh 3y ago
      A study of the formalism called Promise Theory will quickly show how that is not true. Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information. I can mention other frameworks -- Cynefine, and the error where one confuses a Complicated domain (that can still be accurately modeled) with a Complex domain (that is impossible to accurately model). Or what James C Scott discusses an idea called "legibility" and the fallacy in imposing legibility on complex systems in his book, Seeing Like a State. Perceptions matter. Blaming the participants of a system for their being uninformed will not lead to voluntary cooperation, much less reliable systems that involve both machines and humans.
      • pessimizer 3y ago
        > Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information. There's going to have to be (or there may already be) a rule against accusing people of being ChatGPT, but I can't believe that this is an argument that the "imperfect information" that average people have about some condition or event is somehow more important than the actuality of the condition or event precisely because of how wrong average people can be? Because voluntary cooperation? I should only be concerned with that if I'm doing PR work for these companies. It's their job to sell safety, the only thing I'm concerned with is when people are lying. Or intentionally confusing the public about some fact, polling the confused public about what they think the facts are, then reporting the poll to further confuse the fact in lieu of simply reporting the data.
• BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  It’s also language that the mainstream media uses to install as much anxiety and terror into as many people as it possibly can. These publications want you to be permanently miserable, outraged, and most importantly constantly refreshing your phone.
• II2II 3y ago
  The numbers they gave is more than a doubling, while they were quite clear about the limitations of their data. That includes not knowing how many AVs are on the road, which is something that the companies should be able to provide. Also look at the claims that AVs have not caused death or serious injury. (I noticed that they did not claim that AVs have not caused injury.) That is great, except I would not expect any given corporate vehicle fleet, autonomous or human controlled, to have a record of causing death or serious injury over a short period of time. The sample size is just too small. Either way, there's not enough data to prove anything. On the other hand, we have a group with a clear conflict of interest (the makers of AVs) up against a group which has noted concerning incidents but has not been provided with the data they need even when it should be available. Then we have a third group who are being asked to let an experiment on the general public proceed. I doubt that it would pass many academic ethics committees, but if you have money, well, go ahead!
  • AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    Anyone seen the rushing dash cam videos where pedestrians are throwing themselves at cars in order to get legal liability payouts. Not that I'm accusing all of the reports here of being something like that, but I wonder if robotaxis are going to result in something like that and actually make the entire driving world a lot less ethical. Then again it'll all be on camera so maybe not
    • II2II 3y ago
      You will always have opportunists. This article is not about that. The specific incident described by the article is about a car going through caution tape and getting caught up in a fallen overhead powerline. There's very little chance of payouts there, though there probably should be if considerable damage was caused. When it comes to interference with emergency responders, I also doubt it being a case of people looking for payouts. A lot of AV enthusiasts seem to be painting the world as against them, when the reality is that people don't like being unwilling experimental subjects. If there was proof that AVs were safe, I could imagine people jumping on them in droves. Why would one reject having a vehicle where you have the option to drive yourself or have the driving being done for you? (I realize this article isn't about that scenario.) On the other hand, the tech industry's mantra of moving fast and breaking things - something that existed in practice long before the likes of Facebook - has bred an incredible amount of distrust. That distrust has only grown as it has shifted from the technology itself into grand social experiments.
• yafbum 3y ago
  I think it's absolutely critical that public officials report what they see: a dramatic increase in reported incidents. Maybe - probably imo - this is "just" due to an increase in miles driven, but without access to data to support it, public officials can't draw conclusions and they should talk about it. The public cannot simply entrust safety to commercial taxi operators i.e. take Waymo's word for it (or the taxicab mafia's word, for that matter).
• ipaddr 3y ago
  3 to 91 a year later is skyrocketing.
• barbazoo 3y ago
  When I hear "skyrocket" in a headline from a source like that I immediately assume it's something like "from 2 to 4" or something like that.
• kelnos 3y ago
  The article includes a month-by-month graph of incident counts, broken down by company, that shows the "skyrocketing" behavior starting in March of this year. The article notes that the data is incomplete, but that only means that there are more incidents than the graph shows. And I'd also expect that part of the reason for the increase is that there are many more miles driven now by AVs than a year ago. But in a way that doesn't matter: an absolute increase in incidents is a problem, regardless of how much driving is going on. This is especially the case when we're talking about things that human drivers are less likely to do, like driving through caution tape and snagging Muni wires. Not sure how often human drivers run over fire hoses or drive directly into active fire scenes, but I'd expect it's not often when compared with AV software that seems to just not know it's supposed to avoid those things.
  • codeka 3y ago
    > The article notes that the data is incomplete, but that only means that there are more incidents than the graph shows. But what it doesn't note is where the data is incomplete. If they started actively looking for incidents in March of this year, and the previous months are just whatever they happened to notice on social media, then it could be both true that "the data is incomplete" and that "there has not been a skyrocketing of incidents".
• Enginerrrd 3y ago
  Your last paragraph perfectly describes what for me was the key epiphany of my adult life. When I gained the scientific maturity to read papers and I realized how shaky the ground was upon which most studies stand, it was pretty enlightening.
• throwawhey4362 3y ago
  "Self driving cars were born in San Francisco. Companies like Cruise and Waymo are creating something that will literally save lives. But some San Francisco politicians hate technology so much, they’re literally willing to make up statistics lying to the public to justify banning them. It’s a lesson in killing the golden goose." - Garry Tan https://youtu.be/rjgUPUKD-Sc https://youtu.be/rjgUPUKD-Sc
  • aluminum96 3y ago
    Meanwhile, the self-driving cars: - https://twitter.com/desertflyer/status/1677464706251128832 https://twitter.com/desertflyer/status/1677464706251128832 - https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368 https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• dilyevsky 3y ago
  Garry Tan put out a video about it - https://youtu.be/rjgUPUKD-Sc https://youtu.be/rjgUPUKD-Sc
• onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  I mean, it's easy to skyrocket if you start at 1. 1 crash to 8 crashes is 800%. In percentage terms, it's kind of accurate to say "skyrocket". But in absolute terms, it might not mean anything, especially if the number of taxis is up 1000%.
• Nicksil 3y ago
  You still work for Google?
  • dekhn 3y ago
    No, but I have tremendous respect for what Waymo has been doing.
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  Unless you provide counter evidence, you're also just making baseless claims too?
• aluminum96 3y ago
  Waymo and Cruise won't actually release comprehensive data. So anecdotes are all we have to go by... and they don't look particularly good. These are egregious driving mistakes that a human driver would almost never make. - https://twitter.com/desertflyer/status/1677464706251128832 https://twitter.com/desertflyer/status/1677464706251128832 - https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368 https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368 Everyone needs to experience these things for themselves before unleashing them on the public. I want them to work, but in their current state, they are an absolute menace.
  • Zanni 3y ago
    As a sometime pedestrian, I can tell you that those are the sorts of mistakes human drivers make all the time.
    • pms 3y ago
      Are you advocating for normalization of mistakes and bad driving practices? If self-driving corresponds to bad drivers, then is it useful?
  • parshimers 3y ago
    That’s really awful. These kind of incidents need to be investigated. Whatever situation caused the car to just run into the path of a pedestrian in a crosswalk can’t be allowed.
    • sagarm 3y ago
      That's the wonderful thing. Stuff like this happens to me when I'm in foot and there's no way a human drivers would be held accountable. AVs on the other hand have enough scrutiny the behavior will be fixed.
  • divan 3y ago
    In some countries that's the default mode of interaction between human drivers and human pedestrians.
  • 3y ago
• bmitc 3y ago
  > Remember: reality is banal. Isn't that just going in the other direction? I doubt corporations doing open-ended research, testing, and development on public roads can truly be described as banal.
• bitsage 3y ago
  Luckily the article does provide data…
• elif 3y ago
  In terms of 911 and 311 calls: "in that month of March, dangerous self-driving car incidents increased more than 300% over the previous month (30 such incidents in February, 96 in March)." Skyrocket does not seem hyperbolic.
  • ImaCake 3y ago
    The parent comment is saying that the 300% increase is tied to a 300% increase in amount of driveless car activity. In which case, of course incidents increased. If you add 3x as many normal cars on the road the traffic incidents would increase in the same way!
    • seadan83 3y ago
      > If you add 3x as many normal cars on the road the traffic incidents would increase in the same way! Are you sure? In a lot of cases you would get traffic jams. The rate of incidents in a traffic jam are likely different from non-traffic jam conditions. A study from Australia says: "Results showed an approximately linear relationship between traffic volume and accident frequency at lower traffic volumes. In the highest traffic volumes, poisson and negative binomial models showed a significant quadratic explanatory term as accident frequency increases at a higher rate." [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068508/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068508/ What's worse, a big point in the article is that we don't know exactly what the denominator is on the incident rate, and we are not even really sure what the numerator is either. The companies running these protracted live-road experiments are not being forthcoming with their data on how many cars they are running, when, and exactly what the incident count is. Quoting the article: "The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled. Data captured by state regulators, officials say, doesn’t capture the extent of the vehicles’ disruption and potential hazard on city streets."
• nycdatasci 3y ago
  Data appears to be freely available here: 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.... I reviewed a couple dozen incidents and in every case human drivers are to blame. The most extreme example of this was an incident in which a manually operated vehicle repeatedly rear-ended an autonomous vehicle out of spite, then followed it back to the dispatch lot and made a variety of verbal threats.
  • wdabney 3y ago
    So many of these are human drivers at fault doing a hit-and-run. I did see a couple where the AV was at fault, and one poor unfortunate doggo.
  • oblio 3y ago
    Self driving cars will share roads with regular cars for possibly decades.
    • sagarm 3y ago
      Human driven cars have been "sharing" space with pedestrians and cyclists with gory results. AVs mildly annoy human drivers, but are much better behaved. In fact they annoy drivers BECAUSE they are much better behaved.
      • oblio 3y ago
        > Human driven cars have been "sharing" space with pedestrians and cyclists with gory results. That's why in places with good infrastructure, the infrastructure is separated. Pedestrians are on tall sidewalks with few ingress points for cars (unlike in the US where every corner has a lowered curb for 20m just in case some random truck needs to go on the sidewalk??). Sidewalks are on streets with traffic calming, frequently separated from the actual road by a nice hedge or trees or a patch of grass. Bike lanes are completely separated from roads and intersections are also traffic calmed (no slip lanes, roundabouts, multiple lanes separated so that the intersection doesn't require crossing 6-8 dangerous lanes at once). Etc, etc. Do you think it's realistic to maintain 2 sets of road infra for cars (human vs AI)? We can barely maintain 1 set and it's already forcing many places into deeper and deeper debt or even bankruptcy.
• Solvency 3y ago
  Weird, the media used that specific term 24/7 during Covid.
• saagarjha 3y ago
  I have to say I am amused that when it’s news articles of cars running through construction we suddenly start thinking about statistics and when it’s crime in S.F. we jump straight to how the police need to crack down.
• Tade0 3y ago
  To me the term now, after plenty of articles overusing it, means "~40% increase, but the previous number was small to begin with".
• notjulianjaynes 3y ago
  I'm suspicous of your motives for this comment. The article reports a ~30x increase: 3 incidents in April 2022, and 91 incidents in April 2023.