When these go driverless there is going to be a lot of graffiti on them.
Etch bath on windows isn’t cheap to fix.
Etch bath on windows isn’t cheap to fix.
You also assume the SF police force will bother hunting down the perp even with a picture for a crime which likely will go unpunished in SF with its effective decriminalization of petty theft & crime.
Didn't Sony/Nikon/Fuji go through a scandal a decade or two ago where a camera's infrared-based, low-light enhancer was effectively taking nudes of fully-clothed subjects? All clothing is semi-transparent to IR, to varying levels. A mask may not be an effective way to hide your face from a sensitive IR receptor.
Edit: the camera model was a Sony[1] handycam, sold in 1998. It had a "NightShot" mode that removed the IR filter - activating this mode in daylight effectively enabled "X-Ray" vision.
1. http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/ad99e1a3930185817a...
SF: where you can vandalize police cars for 3 years, get booked 3 times, and keep doing it. Waymo cars are an easy target: you know they won't drive off or run you over.
Autonomous cars have the ability to go places by themselves. So the most efficient way to use them is to have on the streets just the right number of cars based on the demand. Because demand, once the service is fully deployed, is quite predictable (this is already so for services like Uber and Lyft), the most likely scenario is that autonomous cars will be on the streets only insofar as it's necessary to meet the demand at any given time and place. I wouldn't be surprised if in a short time, thanks to ML, they'll be able to predict where and when pick-ups will be requested by users.
Since it's quite likely that autonomous cars will be busy going to pick up users, or transporting users, it is very unlikely that they will give any chance to "artists" to make graffiti.
Moreover, when cars are not used, given the relatively very expensive equipment mounted on them, it's very likely that these cars will be parked in surveiled areas.
So, the way I see it, it is very unlikely that graffiti will be a problem. There might be few cases, but nothing systemic.
I don't think people are ready for this part of it. I foresee dedicated lanes.
Designing a wide-open 4 lane boulevard then slapping a 30 mph speed limit on it is a terrible plan, yet how often we do exactly that in our cities.
Ultimately though, it does result in the desired reduction in speed. So yes, it works.
No need to make them poor visibility tho. That would be just stupid.
If you design a road like a highway: wide lanes, straight, flat, open, smooth, no traffic coming against you, you'll drive highway speeds.
If you have narrow lanes, narrow areas, trees, rough surfaces, twists, tight portions, raised areas, etc. you'll drive more carefully.
Putting up a sign with a number is just "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
Most injuries and deaths by car in SF are of people outside of cars, and I suspect that the drivers who maimed/killed those people were usually in front / catching up, not following someone at high speed and had their victim jump between.
The reason people drive as fast as they feel comfortable is that speed limits are seldom and inconsistently enforced, so people are more restricted by their own notion of safety than the risk of any legal consequences.
Anyone who has spent much time there, knows that they have wide roads.
Roads that say "Take me, you gypsy stallion! Do 65 on me!" (with 25MpH speed limits).
And they have some very aggressive cops that basically hide behind hedges, waiting for free spirits.
They might not like forcing people to obey the speed limits and red-light cameras. It would be a significant hit on the bottom line.
I can easily see cities becoming self-driving only.
Right now, it would be easy to go into a parking lot where there's parked cars (aka "driverless cars") and graffiti em, and it's not a very common occurrence for a car owner to get graffitied while parked.
These cars will be even harder targets because they'll have always-on cameras, likely even when parked.