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It's an incentive problem. Uber/Lyft drivers are strongly incentivized to drive as quickly and aggressively as possible. The individual drivers are trading ri

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I may be out-of-date here, but I had thought the accelerometers in the phone detected if drivers were too jerky in the movements of the car and that the drivers would be informed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.
        1y ago
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  Ultra Safe Even if it's Slower Chauffeur company doesn't exist and doesn't have data that can be compared. This is a comparison against the thing Waymo is actually replacing.
- Mawr 1y ago
  > It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late. Good. I don't want my kid who's crossing an intersection to be endangered by an Uber driver that you paid $30 to go extra fast. Nothing like externalizing your poor planning skills onto others.
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.

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.
      - 1y ago
AlotOfReading 1y ago
Ultra Safe Even if it's Slower Chauffeur company doesn't exist and doesn't have data that can be compared. This is a comparison against the thing Waymo is actually replacing.
Mawr 1y ago
> It doesn't care if you're going to lose your job if you're five minutes late. Good. I don't want my kid who's crossing an intersection to be endangered by an Uber driver that you paid $30 to go extra fast. Nothing like externalizing your poor planning skills onto others.

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.