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Comment by rtlfe | Hacker News Reader

Driverless cars are going to be much better than driverful cars in cities since they follow the rules and behave predictably. But I do wish cities would get on board with the clear win of reducing the need for cars. SF is small enough that you could get anywhere pretty easily with an electric-assist bike if only there were sufficiently safe infrastructure. Combine that with better transit, and most people never need to use a car for daily life.

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There's a very long tail here. I went car-less for a year and experienced the downsides pretty frequently. Carrying that damn stand mixer a few miles home sucked, going to events in nice clothes on warm nights wasn't great on a bike, getting groceries from far away or visiting ocean beach took way longer than it should, etc... I eventually gave up and just bought the car. Even though I didn't need it 90% of the time, many things became way easier with it.

If you only need a car for 10% of trips, why not take taxis? It would likely be cheaper and easier (no hassles with parking in the city).

Also if you only need a car for 10% of trips, renting might be cheaper than buying. I don’t own a pickup truck because I rarely need one, but when I do need one I rent one from Lowes or U-Haul.

The problem with that is the additional friction.

If I could rent a car and it arrived in front of my house, no need to own.

But if the nearest car sharing station is 15 minutes away, that just added 30 minutes to every car trip, on top of the friction that comes with such systems.

That's where self-driving cars may be able to make a huge difference.

That's exactly the point. There's a long tail where electric assist bikes and transit aren't ideal options, which is exactly the market where Cruise is trying to fit.

Personally, I did use ride shares, but there was enough need for me that the math worked out for personal ownership.

taxies are not cheap. Just a weekly grocery run for a month is more then my monthly expenses in my paid for car (gas, maintenance, and insurance). A few more other trips and a car is cheaper. That is before we get into my last taxi was driven by a smoker, and a window was broke on the car. (uber might do better now, but as all uber critics note uber fares don't pay the driver a living wage after real expenses, and thus only work out if you have the car anyway)

It can work out, it depends. How often do you need to use the taxi to not inconvenience your lifestyle? Are you the type that would have a new car or used car? more expensive. Would you do your own car maintenance? Do you life to vacation in remote places where you would have to rent a car? Do you have kids (no taxi has a car seat). How good is the local transit service? Is parking "free" with wherever you live and go (use it or not)? I'm sure there is more.

Depends where you live. For me, an Uber Pool to the nearest grocery store is about $5. I could do 40 round trips a month for the cost of insurance and a parking spot.

If you only need it for a couple of runs, compared to gas, price of the car, maintenance, registration, and most importantly insurance, I would be surprised if you didn't come out ahead being a transit weekday commuter and a ride share user for all your edge cases in every city in the U.S.

It sounds like you went without any cars - did you forego taxis etc as well?

If driverless taxi services become cheap enough, they can help with this. Let's build parking garages outside the core neighborhoods, and then remove street parking throughout the city.

That's 20 linear feet of space on nearly all our streets for sidewalks, bikes, restaurants, green spaces, or whatever else.

Street parking can and should be removed even without driverless taxis, but I agree that the taxis reduce the amount of ammunition people have to fight the change.

>> If driverless taxi services

Given Unions and AB5 I'd like to see how driverless is embraced California

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Assembly_Bill_5_(20...

There's a lot of old people in SF who struggle to even walk to the end of a block for a bus stop. A society still needs some solution for picking Grandma up at her door and dropping her off at Thanksgiving.

Incredibly there are countries in the world which are not car centric where people have infirm grandparents.

I wonder what the impact of reduced car ownership is on increased mobility in the elderly population. It wouldn't surprise me if this was correlated.

For one obvious example, the people who legitimately need to rely on cars will spend less time sitting in traffic.

Often the elderly live with family so they are much better attended overall than most in the U.S., and wouldn't need to pick up their own prescriptions themselves in the first place.

I said "most people" won't need cars. I think you'd agree that most people do not struggle to walk short distances.

> Driverless cars are going to be much better than driverful cars in cities since they [WILL] follow the rules and behave predictably

You missed this word. Presently they do not behave predictably and consequently sometimes do not follow the rules. That they might one day achieve these attributes is speculation.

Waymo drives very predictably. Where does your data come from?

>Driverless cars are going to be much better than driverful cars in cities since they follow the rules and behave predictably

This is a really niave take.

Sure they follow rules as well as any other computer but they're gonna be following a set of rules different than the human drivers around them. That's a recipe for a ton of minor accidents.

> but they're gonna be following a set of rules different than the human drivers around them

Hmmm... a "different set of rules than humans" aka following the actual laws that were designed for safety rather than the human rules of "whatever maximizes my personal convenience"

You can't just run over a pedestrian because they use a crosswalk when the signal is telling them to stop. That's not how society works.

These self-driving cars are going to need to be very careful around people if they operate in cities, but if they are careful enough to be safe, they'll also have to deal with groups of bored teenagers herding the cars around for fun.

Sadly, any rule that can't bend to the fact that people are people is doomed to fail.

Maybe for a short time, but soon drivers will learn that the by the book cars exist and account for it. I try to be a by the book driver myself, but I will admit to making many mistakes - even still I can think of several times where following the book sved me from an accident.

> Driverless cars are going to be much better that driverful cars in cities since they follow the rules and behave predictably

But on the other hand, city environment is very unpredictable and lots of other actors there don't follow the rules. It'll be great in long term, but transition will be really hard.

It's hard for me to imagine how it could get worse in the short term. I encounter the following from human drivers on a regular basis, and I can't imagine any reasonable software doing them:

* Notice me attempting to use a crosswalk and choose not to yield

* Drive dangerously close behind my bicycle while honking for additional intimidation

* Pass my bicycle at obviously unsafe distances

* Park in crosswalks

* Blatantly disregard lane markings

* Run stop signs

* Pittsburgh left turns

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/36649/watch-a-tesla-model-3-fa...

So let me rephrase what you just said, you want your life as a pedestrian to rely on software that is not verified by 3rd party in any way and only rely on good faith of manufacturer? Did it ever work well?

Also such manufacturer can update software literally everyday without any external regression testing?

I agree that most of what you mention won't happen but failure mode of AI cars would be much different and imho much worse as pretty impossible to predict.

Human failure models are already impossible to predict, but the impact of those failures are fairly easy to predict. Which is why there is so much pedestrian safety built into so many cities. You don’t need to know why that car is plowing full-speed into a pedestrian-filled NYC sidewalk (terrorism, medical emergency, human error, etc) because no matter what those failures are prevented the same way: giant blocks of concrete making it impossible for a car to get onto the sidewalk. Likewise with driving too fast, driving too slow, failing to stop, stopping unnecessarily, etc.

Any way an AI-driven car can fail, humans have been failing in the same way for a hundred years. Cars, by virtue of their incredibly limited mobility, can only fail in so many different ways. It’s not like a Tesla with autopilot can suddenly jump over barriers or drive sideways.

I think a Tesla where the terrorist has reprogrammed the autopilot can get through the barricades at high speeds, while a human could not. (most barricades I've seen are just fast enough apart that small maintenance trucks can get between them, but close enough that humans go slow - obviously not all are)

One example of a bad outcome is enough for you to decide that driverless cars are unacceptably dangerous? Take a look at number of collisions per mile driven and reconsider.

Collisions per mile driven? Autopilot disengages whenever there is something it cannot handle. How is that meaningful?

You could say it is "one example" if this was a human driver running over a pedestrian. If one AI car has a bug all models with same AI have it. There is 0.5M Model 3 and counting.

I just used one example as a point and it is much less important than issue of 3rd party verification. You don't know if manufacturer fixes the bug, when it is done and you never know if it regresses.

> I just used one example as a point and it is much less important than issue of 3rd party verification. You don't know if manufacturer fixes the bug, when it is done and you never know if it regresses.

No need to preemptively audit the code, accident statistics will clearly indicate unsafe behavior and economic/insurance disincentives[0] will induce continual safety improvements. Either a car will be safe enough to operate or it won't -- remember ~40,000 people are killed by American drivers every year.

[0]The 'Fight Club' equation.

If you're routinely having problems with how everyone else is acting it's probably not them.

There are many things drivers, pedestrians and cyclists do that are not in accordance with the official rules but are expected and accepted. If you don't expect and accept your local variation of whatever these exceptions are you are going to have a very bad time. There is a predictable pattern to how traffic works. Being caught up on the letter of the law will results in you poorly communicating with all the other traffic around you which increases the frequency of conflicts. They way you walk or drive in Boston is different than the way you walk or drive in SF and neither of them adheres strictly to the official rules and markings.

> If you don't expect and accept your local variation of whatever these exceptions are you are going to have a very bad time.

As it turns out I do expect this behavior and still have a very bad time. These laws are not frivolous, and violating them is extremely dangerous.

I've lived on a one-way street for over a decade now. Pre-COVID, it was unusual to go a week without seeing someone going the wrong way. It was not unusual to see this multiple times in a day.

I also bike down a two-way separated bike lane to/from work. It's separated by concrete barriers, except at intersections. I'd come across drivers trying to drive down them, again, roughly weekly.

It's predictable that I'll see a car turn the wrong way onto a one-way street, and I've learned to anticipate it, but it's not accepted.

Most drivers are okay, but there's a small number who are really bad. If you come across a hundred drivers a day, you're going to come across bad ones pretty often.

The author didn't say every driver sucked -- just that he regularly comes across drivers who suck. I'm willing to bet that most road users will assert the same experience.

Most drivers pass safely, and several times a week, one won't. Most drivers stop at red lights, and every week or so, one won't. Most drivers check their mirrors before turning, and every few hundred, one won't. Most drivers use their turn signals and...actually, that last one might be a lie.

I have to disagree though: all drivers are bad. Most think of themselves as good drivers who only make a rare mistake - but all those rare mistakes across the thousands of drivers you encounter every day means it is rare that you don't see someone do something wrong regularly.

There are a few really bad drivers who shouldn't have a license. However that isn't most of the cases of bad driving you see in a day.

You also have: - People jaywalking without looking at the street - Bicycles running stops and red lights - Dogs running onto the street - People leaving stuff on the road - Trees falling on the street - People standing in the middle of the road and talking - Kids running on the street after the ball - Things falling of other cars - Bicycles driving at night without lights - Deep potholes

World is unpredictable, and city environments are full of surprises. Machine needs to be aware of rules and follow up, but also be able to deal with rules being broken by other users. General rule "approach with caution and be ready to react" doesn't work that well with machines - problem is very very tricky. There's a reason why Waymo had self driving cars for 10 years already, but are still in very limited beta.

> and behave predictably.

Not with the amount of ML, particularly DNN, involved.

Shopping is hard without a car. You can only buy a few items at a time. This works great if you have local bodegas all over the place, but not so much if you depend on supermarkets.

You'd be surprised at how much fits in a good backpack or set of panniers. A bike trailer is also an option if you really need a lot, and as a side benefit you can carry your kids in it when you're not grocery shopping. Delivery is another reasonable option that probably causes less pollution and traffic than everybody driving their own car to the store.

You'd be surprised at how often your bike is gone when you walk out of the grocery store. If city governments want to encourage cycling then they'll have to take bike theft as seriously as auto theft and stop coddling thieves.

Your bike is not getting clipped at vons in broad daylight while you are inside for 30 mins and my vons borders many a bike chop businesses operating out of tents on the sidewalk. Overnight? Absolutely.

I shop with a backpack with can contain plenty.

Sure, this is largely true (panniers and trailers not withstanding), but most car trips aren't to the store. I suspect the majority are to/from work/school.

If we enabled more people to bike for our commutes and just use a driverless car (or a taxi/Lyft) for shopping, car ownership would be much less essential, and car rush hour would be a thing of the past.

I just hope they put a bike rack on the Cruise cars. :-)

I've stayed for extensive periods in Montreal and this wasn't an issue for me and what I assume are the more permanent residents of the city. The transit system was excellent and accommodated people carrying groceries quite easily. In cases when I had to lug something heavy, I would just grab a taxi. I've never needed a car in that city yet and the one time I did show up with a rental car for a short visit, trying to deal with parking the darn thing was a flaming headache that almost ruined the trip (Old Port fortunately had good, albeit expensive, parking.)

yeah it's a land use problem of our own creation. Cities have banned small supermarkets in residential neighbourhoods and only allowed big box stores on the outskirts.

The end result is 'food deserts' where one has to have a car to drive out to get food.

I use one of those huge blue ikea bags and I can haul a weeks worth of groceries home from Vons while riding my skateboard. Plenty of others just use their own fold up grocery carts, which is probably a lot better than the circus act I'm attempting.

Half of what keeps NYC pedestrians on the sidewalk is the fear of being run over by cars. If pedestrians know they can just safely cut in front of cars whenever they want, I fear the average speed in the city is going to drop from 12 to 6...

That sounds like a good thing. Especially with all the outdoor dining now!

You're saying it's good that the majority of people who are not in cars live in constant fear for their lives?

No, I'm saying there is a balance struck between pedestrian mobility and vehicle mobility in NY. Personally I would prefer to see almost all streets in Manhattan below 110th to be shut down to vehicle traffic, but I know I would never get my way.

Even without the fear of death, a lot of people don't want to cut in front of a car and get honked at and flipped off. But if you see that it is just an empty self driving car, with no human present to get mad at you, the calculus changes as to whether you cut it off or not. And that can have cascading consequences for average vehicle speed.

Sounds like an effective way to relaim streets and break up the pavement!

I like to think of the shuttle bus operators at my old university between classes. Just inching along as the sea of people slowly part in front and behind you. Ebb and flow.

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