6 ms·

This will surely get some skepticism as it's a Waymo study, but it's nice to see a real‐world dataset this large at 56M miles. An 85 % drop in serious‐injury cr

This will surely get some skepticism as it's a Waymo study, but it's nice to see a real‐world dataset this large at 56M miles. An 85 % drop in serious‐injury crashes and 96 % fewer intersection collisions is a strong signal that Level 4 ADS can meaningfully improve safety in ride-hail settings. Still curious about how much of that comes from operational design versus the core autonomy, but it’s a big leap beyond “novelty demo.” Really excited for autonomy to become more and more common place. People drive more and more like distracted lunatics these days it seems

buckle8017 1y ago
It's an incentive problem. Uber/Lyft drivers are strongly incentivized to drive as quickly and aggressively as possible. The individual drivers are trading risk for cash. A company like Google isn't going to make that trade because it's actually the wrong trade across millions of hours.
- somanyphotons 1y ago
  I may be out-of-date here, but I had thought the accelerometers in the phone detected if drivers were too jerky in the movements of the car and that the drivers would be informed of poor service
  - pests 1y ago
    DoorDash (so food not people) will give you a report for hard braking / acceleration but it doesn't actually affect anything afaict.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Good point: Part of Waymo's safety stats comes from settings that are probably tuned right now in favor of safety stats even if it means a longer or less-profitable ride. It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late. So a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.
  - notatoad 1y ago
    >a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company. no, comparing them to real alternatives is the fair comparison. that they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point, not something that you should be trying to factor out of the comparisons.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      > they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point For now, yes. My point is that there's very often big gap between "how safely does it work in a lab when the people running it are trying to play up its safety" versus "how safely will X actually work once we start using it everywhere." Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well! If we want self-driving cars to retain the same safety later, there needs to be something which prevents humans from flicking the safety-versus-speed dial a little bit over and over in order to make quarterly earnings projections.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well But they aren’t. These are. Planes could be less safe if pilots flew them into cliffs on the regular, but they don’t and so are not.
        Terr_ 1y ago
        > But they [manual vehicles] aren’t [being operated by a corporation with a very strong incentive to publicly demonstrate safety]. These [automated vehicles] are. Uh, yes, you're kinda repeating my thesis, and two copies don't cancel each other out. > Planes could be less safe if pilots flew them into cliffs on the regular, but they don’t and so are not. I don't understand what you're trying to convey with this tautology. _________ Imagine two fleets of cars/planes/whatever with utterly identical equipment and expertise. The only difference is that for one of them, the management is being pressured by politicians to demonstrate a high degree of safety. For that scenario, wouldn't you agree that the better-safety comes from temporary external cause? And also agree that the better-safety is unlikely to persist long after the incentive disappears? [TLDR] Some portion of Waymo's safety-stats are due to the investor/regulatory context in which it currently operates, rather than the underlying technology; the effects of that portion will not be permanent; this should affect how we do comparisons.
- rozap 1y ago
  There was a study a few years back that showed male uber drivers earned more than female drivers. How could this be so, when the dispatch algorithm doesn't discriminate? Turns out men just drive a little faster in the aggregate so they made iirc around 3% more money.
  - zitterbewegung 1y ago
    Not sure if this is the study but this looks like a good study where they found it was 7% when the study was done. https://economics.uchicago.edu/news/study-finds-gender-pay-gap-among-uber-drivers-2018#:~:text=Using%20a%20sample%20of%20over,percent%20more%20than%20do%20women. https://economics.uchicago.edu/news/study-finds-gender-pay-g...
    - rozap 1y ago
      Yep that was it, an even bigger gap than I remembered. Thanks for linking it.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  I think the problem is a general one about drivers, not just ride-sharers. I live in a fairly busy area and I am beset by aggressive drivers any time I need to cross a busy road. So many drivers simply ignore pedestrians by default. Not that many of them have Uber or Lyft signs in the window, if anything commercial drivers tend to be a bit more careful in my experience because the downside risk is being unable to work any driving job.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    About half of commercial drivers is my conclusion. (though I'm not collecting statistically valid data) Just judging by the number of commercial vehicles who drive into the crosswalk I use often.
shihabkhanbd 1y ago
[dead]
xnx 1y ago
It's good to be skeptical of the source, but I can't remember seeing any substantive criticism of the methodology or conclusions.
- manquer 1y ago
  Here is one, Humans drive in all weather conditions on all types of roads and also many types of personal vehicles of varying ages and conditions. Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather and is limited to a relatively large and safer expensive SUV that is maintained professionally in a fleet. Studies like this rarely account for such factors , they are compare optimal conditions for self driving to average conditions for humans. Even if waymo was better when accounting for these factors , if it was much worse in the conditions humans typically are expected to drive [1] they self driving is still less safe than humans on average . A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft). I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group . [1] no study will ever show this as they wouldn’t be able to trial it under those conditions if it is not safe enough
  - darkwizard42 1y ago
    This isn't even true because the dataset compares against conditions IN THE CITY they operate in. They operate year-round in SF and in the same conditions human drivers do.
  - pb7 1y ago
    Waymos drive in all weather in the cities they're deployed in; cities where people crash all the time in all types of weather.
    - manquer 1y ago
      Waymo ( and self driving programs as well) have been careful not to go for public large scale deployments in any city with difficult weather and for good reason focused on cities like Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, SF[1] so far with easy driving weather. There have been promising progress and there have been hints of a New York trial soon, but it it well known that self driving cars have not done large scale trial in cities with bad weather. [1] Yes, I am aware SF gets a bit of bad weather with fog and rain but not nearly not as much to make driving quite unsafe like somewhere that gets a feet of snow in 24 hours in winter, and likely promixity to engineering HQs and favourable regulatory climate influenced the SF choice.

buckle8017 1y ago

It's an incentive problem. Uber/Lyft drivers are strongly incentivized to drive as quickly and aggressively as possible. The individual drivers are trading risk for cash. A company like Google isn't going to make that trade because it's actually the wrong trade across millions of hours.

somanyphotons 1y ago
I may be out-of-date here, but I had thought the accelerometers in the phone detected if drivers were too jerky in the movements of the car and that the drivers would be informed of poor service
- pests 1y ago
  DoorDash (so food not people) will give you a report for hard braking / acceleration but it doesn't actually affect anything afaict.
Terr_ 1y ago
Good point: Part of Waymo's safety stats comes from settings that are probably tuned right now in favor of safety stats even if it means a longer or less-profitable ride. It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late. So a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.
- notatoad 1y ago
  >a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company. no, comparing them to real alternatives is the fair comparison. that they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point, not something that you should be trying to factor out of the comparisons.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    > they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point For now, yes. My point is that there's very often big gap between "how safely does it work in a lab when the people running it are trying to play up its safety" versus "how safely will X actually work once we start using it everywhere." Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well! If we want self-driving cars to retain the same safety later, there needs to be something which prevents humans from flicking the safety-versus-speed dial a little bit over and over in order to make quarterly earnings projections.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well But they aren’t. These are. Planes could be less safe if pilots flew them into cliffs on the regular, but they don’t and so are not.
      - Terr_ 1y ago
        > But they [manual vehicles] aren’t [being operated by a corporation with a very strong incentive to publicly demonstrate safety]. These [automated vehicles] are. Uh, yes, you're kinda repeating my thesis, and two copies don't cancel each other out. > Planes could be less safe if pilots flew them into cliffs on the regular, but they don’t and so are not. I don't understand what you're trying to convey with this tautology. _________ Imagine two fleets of cars/planes/whatever with utterly identical equipment and expertise. The only difference is that for one of them, the management is being pressured by politicians to demonstrate a high degree of safety. For that scenario, wouldn't you agree that the better-safety comes from temporary external cause? And also agree that the better-safety is unlikely to persist long after the incentive disappears? [TLDR] Some portion of Waymo's safety-stats are due to the investor/regulatory context in which it currently operates, rather than the underlying technology; the effects of that portion will not be permanent; this should affect how we do comparisons.
rozap 1y ago
There was a study a few years back that showed male uber drivers earned more than female drivers. How could this be so, when the dispatch algorithm doesn't discriminate? Turns out men just drive a little faster in the aggregate so they made iirc around 3% more money.
- zitterbewegung 1y ago
  Not sure if this is the study but this looks like a good study where they found it was 7% when the study was done. https://economics.uchicago.edu/news/study-finds-gender-pay-gap-among-uber-drivers-2018#:~:text=Using%20a%20sample%20of%20over,percent%20more%20than%20do%20women. https://economics.uchicago.edu/news/study-finds-gender-pay-g...
  - rozap 1y ago
    Yep that was it, an even bigger gap than I remembered. Thanks for linking it.
anigbrowl 1y ago
I think the problem is a general one about drivers, not just ride-sharers. I live in a fairly busy area and I am beset by aggressive drivers any time I need to cross a busy road. So many drivers simply ignore pedestrians by default. Not that many of them have Uber or Lyft signs in the window, if anything commercial drivers tend to be a bit more careful in my experience because the downside risk is being unable to work any driving job.
- bluGill 1y ago
  About half of commercial drivers is my conclusion. (though I'm not collecting statistically valid data) Just judging by the number of commercial vehicles who drive into the crosswalk I use often.

shihabkhanbd 1y ago

[dead]

xnx 1y ago

It's good to be skeptical of the source, but I can't remember seeing any substantive criticism of the methodology or conclusions.

manquer 1y ago
Here is one, Humans drive in all weather conditions on all types of roads and also many types of personal vehicles of varying ages and conditions. Waymo is limited to few specific locations with decent roads and does not drive in poor weather and is limited to a relatively large and safer expensive SUV that is maintained professionally in a fleet. Studies like this rarely account for such factors , they are compare optimal conditions for self driving to average conditions for humans. Even if waymo was better when accounting for these factors , if it was much worse in the conditions humans typically are expected to drive [1] they self driving is still less safe than humans on average . A better comparison could be with professional taxi drivers for the same city (not Uber or Lyft). I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is either on par or poorer than this group . [1] no study will ever show this as they wouldn’t be able to trial it under those conditions if it is not safe enough
- darkwizard42 1y ago
  This isn't even true because the dataset compares against conditions IN THE CITY they operate in. They operate year-round in SF and in the same conditions human drivers do.
- pb7 1y ago
  Waymos drive in all weather in the cities they're deployed in; cities where people crash all the time in all types of weather.
  - manquer 1y ago
    Waymo ( and self driving programs as well) have been careful not to go for public large scale deployments in any city with difficult weather and for good reason focused on cities like Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, SF[1] so far with easy driving weather. There have been promising progress and there have been hints of a New York trial soon, but it it well known that self driving cars have not done large scale trial in cities with bad weather. [1] Yes, I am aware SF gets a bit of bad weather with fog and rain but not nearly not as much to make driving quite unsafe like somewhere that gets a feet of snow in 24 hours in winter, and likely promixity to engineering HQs and favourable regulatory climate influenced the SF choice.