9 ms·

So, they create traffic blockages as a sort of civic disobedience? How is this helping anyone? I guess they get to feel the thrill of outrage culture for a bit.

So, they create traffic blockages as a sort of civic disobedience? How is this helping anyone? I guess they get to feel the thrill of outrage culture for a bit. And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!"

cozzyd 3y ago
I would say the driverless cars are making the blockages, if they're not able to deal with this totally predictable light vandalism
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  Vandalism is illegal, I hope these companies open up civil action against these protestors individually for lost revenue, and costs
  - cozzyd 3y ago
    Sure and so is speeding, double parking, not stopping at stop signs and failing to signal, but the cars still have to deal with that. I'm not condoning the protestors but failure to deal with this (and other similar things... Minor mechanical trouble, birds shitting on sensors, brushing snow off windshield) is a real problem for autonomous cars.
blurker 3y ago
[flagged]
- dandellion 3y ago
  Most accidents have human drivers, shouldn't they protest those if they're so concerned?
  - blurker 3y ago
    Well yes, and many do! Most cities now have vision zero movements in part because of this.
BurningFrog 3y ago
[dead]
Zigurd 3y ago
I think this particular protest is counterproductive. AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc. But protest isn't meant to be convenient.
- ajuc 3y ago
  > AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc Highly doubt it. 1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho. Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :) 2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :) It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop). If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    As someone who lives far enough out of the nearest major city that I don't really pop in casually for a meal or drink. (It's very doable but I end up being on the road for a good two hours total around whatever activity I'm doing.) An AV wouldn't be free to travel that distance but I would absolutely do that and other activities requiring 1+ hour drives each way more frequently if I didn't need to do the driving myself.
seadan83 3y ago
> And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!" Seems like the protestors are not required for this to happen: > The city’s transportation agencies documented several incidents where driverless cars disrupted Muni service. During the night of Sept. 23, five Cruise cars blocked traffic lanes on Mission Street in Bernal Heights, stalling a Muni bus for 45 minutes. On at least three different occasions, Cruise cars stopped on Muni light-rail tracks, halting service. Meanwhile, these additional things are happening: > San Francisco firefighters were battling a two-alarm apartment blaze on the corner of Hayes and Divisadero streets during a recent Sunday morning when a driverless Cruise car entered the active firefighting scene and nearly ran over fire hoses on the street. > Firefighters at the scene stood in front of the car to try to get it to stop, but the autonomous vehicle came to a halt only after one of them smashed the Cruise car’s front window amid the chaotic effort to put out a fire that displaced 25 people, according to city transportation officials. > A Cruise vehicle came to a stop after nearly colliding with a Muni N-Judah train at the intersection of Carl and Cole streets. The Cruise car blocked light-rail tracks in both directions for close to seven minutes. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/ > A passenger in a driverless Cruise vehicle suffered injuries on Thursday after the vehicle was struck by a San Francisco fire truck that was responding to an emergency call. > Now, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has requested the autonomous vehicle company cut its San Francisco fleet in half, following this latest incident. Cruise told KTVU the company will comply with that request. https://www.ktvu.com/news/cruise-robotaxi-with-passenger-crashes-into-san-francisco-fire-truck https://www.ktvu.com/news/cruise-robotaxi-with-passenger-cra...
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  What is your point? That the cars themselves sometimes block traffic, therefore it's okay for protestors to stop them and block traffic?
  - deprecative 3y ago
    That's literally the point of a protest.
  - 3y ago
xyst 3y ago
The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable. They are testing this crap in TX and the roads here are shit, worse after/during rain events. Have seen multiple times where a traffic light goes out or the lines are not legible and the “autonomous” vehicle just sits there with its hazard lights on.
- jbotdev 3y ago
  To be fair, public transport often has similar issues. If a subway/train car is stuck, nothing else can get by on the same track and thousands of people could be delayed. It happens in NYC all the time. At least with the road system there are typically ways to get around stopped cars.
- soligern 3y ago
  That’s stupid. You could park a golf cart on the train tracks and it would shut down all train transport for hours. You could cut out a piece of the rail very easily (with an angle grinder) and it would cause dozens of deaths and shut down the line for weeks. The right course of action is to make messing with automated cars like this a crime just like it is with the railways.
  - almost_usual 3y ago
    Cutting a train track with an angle grinder isn’t the same as taking less than five seconds to put a traffic cone on a car. It takes them 30 minutes in this video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjDp5lL7_Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjDp5lL7_Q
    - soligern 3y ago
      You could disable a diverter in 5 seconds with a sledge hammer. Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds.
      - 3y ago
jgerrish 3y ago
> How is this helping anyone? One could argue it's utilizing a set of free people to create a Chaos Monkey-esque environment to train cars. This increases resilience and speeds up the timeline for driverless cars. Which of course decreases alcohol-related fatalities. It's that last part that is tough to argue against. Of course, there is the stress of creating an identity politics cultural clash in a city of millions. These are people who we now face on an incredible divide. It takes work, and it costs stress, to bridge that. Over two decades ago, after the first dot-com crash, I remember one of the last statements from a SF resident before I left. That it was my fault, or the people like me, that the city ended up the way it did. That stung. A lot. But, you cant argue we're not saving lives from drunk drivers. That's something that will help on both coasts and the middle.
- yayitswei 3y ago
  Nitpick: SF has less than a million residents (although many more commute to work there).
Ar-Curunir 3y ago
Protests are inconvenient. That’s the point.
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
Fricken 3y ago
The civilians should be more obedient while we work on new and devious ways of extracting rent from them.
milsorgen 3y ago
They "protested" city bikes, scooters and ebikes a while back too. It was essentially a justification and excuse to destroy them in various ways.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
They’re outraged that their city is being used as a testing ground for driver safety.

cozzyd 3y ago

I would say the driverless cars are making the blockages, if they're not able to deal with this totally predictable light vandalism

phpisthebest 3y ago
Vandalism is illegal, I hope these companies open up civil action against these protestors individually for lost revenue, and costs
- cozzyd 3y ago
  Sure and so is speeding, double parking, not stopping at stop signs and failing to signal, but the cars still have to deal with that. I'm not condoning the protestors but failure to deal with this (and other similar things... Minor mechanical trouble, birds shitting on sensors, brushing snow off windshield) is a real problem for autonomous cars.

blurker 3y ago

[flagged]

dandellion 3y ago
Most accidents have human drivers, shouldn't they protest those if they're so concerned?
- blurker 3y ago
  Well yes, and many do! Most cities now have vision zero movements in part because of this.

BurningFrog 3y ago

[dead]

Zigurd 3y ago

I think this particular protest is counterproductive. AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc. But protest isn't meant to be convenient.

ajuc 3y ago
> AVs will make public transit work a lot better and reduce traffic, make pedestrians safer, etc Highly doubt it. 1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho. Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :) 2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :) It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop). If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.
- ghaff 3y ago
  As someone who lives far enough out of the nearest major city that I don't really pop in casually for a meal or drink. (It's very doable but I end up being on the road for a good two hours total around whatever activity I'm doing.) An AV wouldn't be free to travel that distance but I would absolutely do that and other activities requiring 1+ hour drives each way more frequently if I didn't need to do the driving myself.

seadan83 3y ago

> And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!" Seems like the protestors are not required for this to happen: > The city’s transportation agencies documented several incidents where driverless cars disrupted Muni service. During the night of Sept. 23, five Cruise cars blocked traffic lanes on Mission Street in Bernal Heights, stalling a Muni bus for 45 minutes. On at least three different occasions, Cruise cars stopped on Muni light-rail tracks, halting service. Meanwhile, these additional things are happening: > San Francisco firefighters were battling a two-alarm apartment blaze on the corner of Hayes and Divisadero streets during a recent Sunday morning when a driverless Cruise car entered the active firefighting scene and nearly ran over fire hoses on the street. > Firefighters at the scene stood in front of the car to try to get it to stop, but the autonomous vehicle came to a halt only after one of them smashed the Cruise car’s front window amid the chaotic effort to put out a fire that displaced 25 people, according to city transportation officials. > A Cruise vehicle came to a stop after nearly colliding with a Muni N-Judah train at the intersection of Carl and Cole streets. The Cruise car blocked light-rail tracks in both directions for close to seven minutes. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/ > A passenger in a driverless Cruise vehicle suffered injuries on Thursday after the vehicle was struck by a San Francisco fire truck that was responding to an emergency call. > Now, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has requested the autonomous vehicle company cut its San Francisco fleet in half, following this latest incident. Cruise told KTVU the company will comply with that request. https://www.ktvu.com/news/cruise-robotaxi-with-passenger-crashes-into-san-francisco-fire-truck https://www.ktvu.com/news/cruise-robotaxi-with-passenger-cra...

ZoomerCretin 3y ago
What is your point? That the cars themselves sometimes block traffic, therefore it's okay for protestors to stop them and block traffic?
- deprecative 3y ago
  That's literally the point of a protest.
- 3y ago

xyst 3y ago

The fact that a single car can even cause this much harm is a sign of a much larger problem: car centric transportation is NOT scalable. They are testing this crap in TX and the roads here are shit, worse after/during rain events. Have seen multiple times where a traffic light goes out or the lines are not legible and the “autonomous” vehicle just sits there with its hazard lights on.

jbotdev 3y ago
To be fair, public transport often has similar issues. If a subway/train car is stuck, nothing else can get by on the same track and thousands of people could be delayed. It happens in NYC all the time. At least with the road system there are typically ways to get around stopped cars.
soligern 3y ago
That’s stupid. You could park a golf cart on the train tracks and it would shut down all train transport for hours. You could cut out a piece of the rail very easily (with an angle grinder) and it would cause dozens of deaths and shut down the line for weeks. The right course of action is to make messing with automated cars like this a crime just like it is with the railways.
- almost_usual 3y ago
  Cutting a train track with an angle grinder isn’t the same as taking less than five seconds to put a traffic cone on a car. It takes them 30 minutes in this video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjDp5lL7_Q https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjDp5lL7_Q
  - soligern 3y ago
    You could disable a diverter in 5 seconds with a sledge hammer. Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds.
    - 3y ago

jgerrish 3y ago

> How is this helping anyone? One could argue it's utilizing a set of free people to create a Chaos Monkey-esque environment to train cars. This increases resilience and speeds up the timeline for driverless cars. Which of course decreases alcohol-related fatalities. It's that last part that is tough to argue against. Of course, there is the stress of creating an identity politics cultural clash in a city of millions. These are people who we now face on an incredible divide. It takes work, and it costs stress, to bridge that. Over two decades ago, after the first dot-com crash, I remember one of the last statements from a SF resident before I left. That it was my fault, or the people like me, that the city ended up the way it did. That stung. A lot. But, you cant argue we're not saving lives from drunk drivers. That's something that will help on both coasts and the middle.

yayitswei 3y ago
Nitpick: SF has less than a million residents (although many more commute to work there).

Ar-Curunir 3y ago

Protests are inconvenient. That’s the point.

black_13 3y ago

[dead]

Fricken 3y ago

The civilians should be more obedient while we work on new and devious ways of extracting rent from them.

milsorgen 3y ago

They "protested" city bikes, scooters and ebikes a while back too. It was essentially a justification and excuse to destroy them in various ways.

pipeline_peak 3y ago

They’re outraged that their city is being used as a testing ground for driver safety.