Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New York City | Hacker News Reader

Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New York City

blog.waymo.com

279 pointsalexrustic369 comments

As someone who both bikes and drives around Brooklyn, I would bet this is going to be nearly a decade of testing. There are so many edge cases that I encounter on almost every single trip, and I just don't see anything but very advanced AI handling it

- obvious, but large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists

- 2 way roads becoming 1 lane where the directions must take turns due to construction, deliveries, or the Uber in front of you stopping in the middle of traffic for a pickup

- resurfaced roads that don't have lines painted on them for weeks or months

- congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally, so you have to just pull into the intersection trusting that traffic will clear when the next light turns green

- pittsburgh lefts need to happen for the sake of traffic flow sometimes

- sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need.

- another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time

- you can disrupt traffic flow quite badly if you e.g. don't pull up to the crosswalk, and out of the way of cars behind you, while waiting for pedestrians to cross on a turn (humans are also bad at this)

- it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing

- delivery drivers on electric bikes or mopeds zipping the wrong way down the road at 30mph, feeling like they are inches away from colliding with you

- roads completely blocked because of the aforementioned double-parking. If someone is double-parked in a way that prevents a delivery truck from getting through, the entire block gets filled with cars that can't move. Then everyone has to back out, one-by-one.

- situations where a police car or ambulance has their lights on behind you and there is literally nowhere to go to get out of their way other than straight through a red light.

To add to something you said:

> sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need

I'm generally a pretty slow and careful driver in other places, but having driven around NYC for many years now, I can say that it's basically necessary to be an extremely aggressive driver here. If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off. It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and you get nowhere. Anyone who's taken an Uber, Lyft, or taxi in NYC knows the way you need to drive to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.

I'd honestly be excited if they pulled it off. A robot driving like a real New Yorker, but presumably a lot safer? How cool would that be!

> If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off. It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and you get nowhere.

This is going to be a major challenge or at least a major change for Waymo. It's been a while since I've driven near one, but they were very timid with lane changes. Also, there was that published incident when the Waymo car tried to change lanes into a bus.

There's unwritten rules about who you can cut off. My experience is from LA freeways, the rules may be different in NYC, but the concept is the same. Buses and other vehicles, usually no, but sometimes. Marked taxis, no. Older vehicle with lots of scrapes, probably no. Also, the proper time to signal your lane change is often after your car is already in the lane enough that you can't be displaced.

Why would you not cut off buses and taxis?

They are professional drivers, so you can rely on them being better than the average drivers in difficult situations like having to brake suddenly, so I think you should cut them off preferentially.

At least in San Francisco a bus is king of the road. They will run a red light at normal speed and just beep beep to tell everyone that this is happening. An abrupt stop isn't possible because people are standing inside and might get hurt.

Same reason why a bus will not suddenly slow down to let you into their lane unless lives are at stake. Which at sub 30mph speeds they're not.

Best to treat a city bus like it's a train.

You can think of being a bus driver in city traffic as a constant trolley problem. As a professional driver, do you risk injuring 50 people inside the bus or 1 idiot on the road?

At least where I drive, taxis drive very aggressively and will win at chicken with me everytime. Sometimes professional means in tune with the equipment and willing to drive at the edge of its capability.

Busses are big and may not stop quickly. If traffic is tight enough that I need to force my way into an opening, traffic may stop suddenly and I don't want to find out if the bus can stop behind me, because if not, I need to shop for a new car and new pants. If things are moving very slowly, then yeah, you can cut them off.

Buses take much longer to slow down than cars and the driver also likely can't see you if you cut them off with little room to spare. So besides not wanting to be a jerk there's self-preservation to think about.

Do not mess around with big city bus drivers, either on the bus or on the road. They are some of the toughest people in the city. Think of what they deal every day.

> I'd honestly be excited if they pulled it off. A robot driving like a real New Yorker, but presumably a lot safer? How cool would that be!

Part of the attraction of self-driving cars is that they will be safer. But as examples like these show, a significant part of danger in driving is completely intentional, especially in cities. You need to deliberately risk crashes all the time to get anywhere and to discourage others (such as pedestrians) from getting in the way. A lot of driving involves such violent threats. I don't know what fraction of crashes comes from this sort of thing, but it would be interesting to estimate, and it would provide an upper bound on the safety advantage of autonomous cars in cities.

Also it's interesting that a robot is more capable of doing dangerous aggressive type of driving if you factor in how many sensor and calculation power it have over a human

Check out this video they posted recently of them driving in SF, which isn't much worse than NYC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA

Look how it handles the bike going against traffic or how well it sees the pedestrians from far away. It's also quite a bit more assertive I find than in Phoenix.

If it's gonna full stop like that in NYc, gonna backup traffic...

You can slow down but you generally don't stop for pedestrians j walking or bikes going wrong way.

Pedestrians generally know when to speedup/slowdown to cut through moving traffic (not always the case of course there are accidents).

If the person halts in way of traffic than sure do a full stop.

> having driven around NYC for many years now, I can say that it's basically necessary to be an extremely aggressive driver here. If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off. It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and you get nowhere.

It's beyond that: by behaving in an unexpected manner, and by disrupting the flow of traffic, you are a danger.

To be honest, I'd happily let my car mess up the flow of traffic trying to block the box. The only reason this exists is because everyone decides to enter the box to make the light.

When working in SF without self driving I would regularly not let myself block the box and I'd miss multiple lights. Police need to actually ticket people that do this. I've seen cops sitting at the intersection waiting to ticket people for bypassing traffic by using the carpool freeway entrance while doing fuckall about the blocked intersection causing people to want to choose the HOV option.

I understand that it's a part of driving that a self driving car would need to know how to navigate. But we really should just fix this problem through proper traffic enforcement instead of trying to make self driving cars participate in this completely shitty and unnecessary practice.

I agree with you in principle about not blocking the box. But in practice it's not always like that. Sometimes the actual light timing needs to change. Sometimes the roads need to just be different than they are to prevent bottlenecks, which is a pretty expensive fix

Sometimes you roll up to an intersection, and every time the light turns green, the direction you're trying to go already has all lanes filled by another approaching direction. Every time.

Really, Manhattan is just a terrible place to drive. A horribly congested island with limited ways in and out, that is also sometimes the lowest-cost way to get between the mainland and geographic Long Island. The same goes for the rest of NYC to a lesser extent; shoutouts to Elmhurst and Flushing for being particularly terrible places to drive.

Not a morning goes by without a report of "45 minutes/1 hour to the Holland Tunnel." There isn't really a scalable fix for the solution that involves road capacity.

Classic prisoners dilemma. The lanes are blocked because the people up ahead are thinking the same thing.

>Sometimes you roll up to an intersection, and every time the light turns green, the direction you're trying to go already has all lanes filled by another approaching direction. Every time.

The only time I can imagine this happening is when trying to turn left, at which point the solution is to go past the turn, double back, and approach the intersection so you can make the turn from the right.

How expensive can it really be to put up a "NO TURN ON RED" sign?

This partly falls under "3 hours to pass through legally", but I would add to this the significant number of major intersections where the marked lanes are completely ignored at all times. For example one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp. However, probably at least 60% of cars passing through the intersection want to get on the highway, so in practice both of the lanes adjacent to the designated lane are also used to access the on-ramp, resulting in an uncontrolled 3-way merge during a sharp left turn in the middle of an intersection.

Edit: For anyone curious, my particular example is getting on 278 South coming from the southeast on Prospect Ave.

https://goo.gl/maps/ySokhy6uXEPPGoG8A

> one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp.

I suspected instantly you were talking about the prospect Ave BQE entrance . I make that left off third ave onto Hamilton most mornings, and the difference between being in the first- or second-from-left vs third-from-left turning lane is probably an extra 10 minute delay for exactly the reason you describe. I’m no expert in self-driving cars/line following robots, but I suspect real-world NYC driving is computationally impossible at this time.

Yes, this also describes, for example, the next entrance at Hamilton and Hicks. Although there’s it’s narrower so primarily just one extra lane.

I used to have a drive home where one of the roads had a single lane that everyone local treated by convention like it was actually two lanes, one lane to go straight through and one to turn right, which worked fine until someone from out of town was driving in it and got in the wrong "lane" or just stayed in the middle

I was curious! But not too curious, since this maybe describes most of the on-ramps to the BQE

> another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time

I took a wrong turn in heavy NYC traffic once (trying to get to the Lincoln Tunnel on a Friday) and it cost me over 2 hours.

In Philadelphia driving this is called the "New Jersey" problem -- you miss your turn or your exit and all of a sudden you're on a bridge heading to New Jersey with no real idea of how you got there.

My friends call it getting “Newarked”. If we visit NJ for any reason and miss any turn in Bergen, Hudson, Essex, or Union county, and try to use road signs to get back on track, we end up at Newark Airport Terminal C. It’s like the entire NJ roadway system is a feed network for United Departures.

In Atlanta it’s called the “stone mountain” problem.

I once tried to pass through NYC on the way from Boston to DC and somehow managed to get turned a full 180º around and end up headed back north. On the bright side, superhuman performance might not be a very high bar to clear here.

I mean the way to solve this is to prioritize waiting for a turn over the penalty to missing it.

You would have the same issue if you missed the last exit in San Francisco and got stuck going all the way across the Bay Bridge (can easily hit 2 hours trying to go over and back in traffic both ways)

Sort of. The issue is that it's not just "waiting for a turn", it's often "start changing lanes into a small gap because you know the human drivers will make space and let you in". In which case, what you're saying is "drive more aggressively if there's a large time penalty for not doing so", which is at least a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer algorithm

>a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer algorithm

I suspect this is going to be a fundamental issue with AI. Far from some idealized 3 laws of robotics, AIs will need to behave like humans to fit in our society. And that will force us to confront the ways in which we don't follow our own rules - indeed can't follow our own rules, the rules being impractical but a convenient fiction to allow us feel better about ourselves.

I think it is the same criteria you apply as a human. If you need to get into a lane and make a turn, you will slow down, block your lane and inch in till someone lets you in.

I do think there has to be an aggressiveness level in making maneuvers for an autonomous car. It doesn't mean its unsafe, it just means it could be MORE safe if the time penalty isn't big (a decision that regular drivers have a hard time evaluating since we don't measure our own maneuvers' safety accurately)

A flashing sign that says 'SELF-DRIVING CAR' will help. OTOH, other drivers might see deep pockets for a lawsuit.

Actually it was a wrong turn in an unclearly-marked construction zone. I was using Google Maps at the time, but the road change was recent enough (perhaps that same morning) that the big G was wrong.

Then you'll just have a car stopped in a lane until someone takes pity on it. That isn't an acceptable solution either.

The solution is to figure out what the traffic rule is based on what the other traffic is doing. But that introduces other pitfalls if you don't do it right.

I mean this is what happens to folks as they try to get into a one-lane exit, someone has to let you in.

I guess one benefit of more autonomous vehicles might be cooperation between vehicles to greatly reduce traffic and congestion in these sorts of situations

The big isssue with lane merging is that you have to be assertive and risky in cities or you are just going to be trapped and no one will let you in. You have to almost dare cars to hit you in order to force yourself to have space. I can't imagine a self driving car ever doing that well. It's an entire dance.

> it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing

This is so true. Cars haphazardly double park on either side. Best case you’re dodging and weaving, drifting through the painted lane suggestions. Sometimes you’re just stuck and waiting while one of them decides to move. Always the bicyclists get the raw end of the deal in terms of their safety and priority.

I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes, and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on both sides.

If you just had one functioning, unimpeded lane for car traffic I suspect it’d improve traffic conditions considerably, vs. four extremely inefficient lanes for cars (2x parking, 2x driving)

>I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes, and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on both sides.

They do this a lot in midtown - commercial only parking during business hours to allow loading/unloading AND you don't need the cops to enforce it because the traffic enforcement people can just write tickets

just fyi, the traffic enforcement people are cops. Giuliani had them moved under NYPD because otherwise they kept getting assaulted.

> congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally

I cannot imagine how self driving cars will (in the future...) deal with entering the Lincoln/Holland/etc. tunnel. I genuinely don't think you can enter these tunnels even during moderate traffic without breaking at least a few laws.

So honest question, when I'm stuck behind one of these fucking things refusing to take a turn correctly, because it means crossing the white line, what do I do?

With a human driver, I can blare the horn, or, god forbid, get out of the car to talk to them.

But with a driverless car, what do I do? Honk at an empty vehicle that literally has no ears?

I love the idea that driverless cars might lower the amount of honking by reducing the number of people who can respond to a honk

Someday I'm going to run for mayor of New York City to institute exactly one policy change. I'll add horn detectors to all traffic lights, and every time it hears a honk, it will make the light stay red for an additional 10 seconds.

Yes, I know that I will be brutally murdered on my second day in office.

I'd give it a matter of hours before the city is inundated with trolls walking and biking around with portable air horns.

You've got my vote.

Why are you so angry?

Presumably because they have to drive a car in downtown Brooklyn occasionally

This Brooklyn Intersection Is The Worst In The State, Study Finds

https://patch.com/new-york/parkslope/brooklyn-intersection-w...

If you were born in NYC like me you develop a deep seeded hatred for the human race.

This would explain all the NYT and Bloomberg articles trying to start fights between different demographics, and the weird aggrieved fixation on the closure of little shops in NYC only known to people on a single street in NYC that wouldn't warrant an international feature anywhere else.

Because for New Yorkers, the light in the end of the tunnel is... New Jersey.

That's not anger, that's just how New Yorkers talk. Get the ideas and emotions out front, no time for a chit-chat warmup. I love NY. (Truly, I don't hear anger when I read it.)

Jesus you shouldn't be driving a car if you are that angry

You stare angrily at the passenger until they unlock the door and let you drive the damn thing through the intersection :D

Do the same thing. There's still a human behind the wheels.

You sound like a complete dick when you are behind the wheel. Please consider stopping driving. Your role as a driver isn't to correct other people's driving; it's to get you and your passengers somewhere safely, while keeping all other road users safe.

I see Waymo/Cruise/Zoox autonomous vehicles multiple times a day in San Francisco and every one of these points are something that happens all the time in San Francisco.

Something I didn't see mentioned about NYC was elevation changes and hills, which is something that San Francisco has all over. There are some VERY steep streets in San Francisco, which means that sensors are out of typically alignment in relationship to the road when an autonomous vehicle is at an intersection.

Yeah NYC is crazy. One thing I saw this summer is streets in Little Italy and Chinatown with exactly one lane, and restaurant boxes on BOTH sides in the parking spots.

So if there was a delivery truck that parked to unload, and there were, literally entire blocks of traffic would have to wait behind it.

Sometimes a parking spot would open up between the restaurant boxes. The truck can pull in there a tiny bit but not all the way.

Then maybe there is room for the driver behind to pass. They are scraping by with literally 1 to 3 inches of room, negotiating the space manually.

I can't even see a remote driver handling this situation!

I also think this "testing" won't lead to much concrete in the next 5-10 years. There will be data gathering and spinning of wheels. After all I think by 2016 they were also "testing" in a bunch of places, and 5 years later it's barely deployed.

I’ve never driven in NYC, but I have biked and walked it. NYC may have more frequent edge cases than SF, but in terms of being able to handle urban edge cases I think SF is roughly comparable to NYC. In some regards traffic in NYC seems even more predictable. Like there’s been times I thought a motorist would gun it through a red light in NYC as would happen in SF, only to see the driver stop and then feel embarrassed for being overly cautious.

Yeah, Bay drivers are actually way more nuts than on most of the East coast.

If anyone else was wondering:

> The Pittsburgh left is a colloquial term for the driving practice of the first left-turning vehicle taking precedence over vehicles going straight through an intersection, associated with the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area. [1]

I guess that would be a Pittsburgh right where I come from :)

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left

Funny how congested cities resemble each other, I live in Bucharest (one of the most congested cities in Europe when it comes to road traffic) and I checked 7 out of the 9 points you mentioned (I'm too lazy to search for what a Pittsburgh left means and I ignored the waymo-specific bullet-point).

I'll add the numerous cases when you have cyclists (especially delivery guys) and rental scooters coming your way on a one way street. Because of that I always, always check both ways when entering a one way street from a side-street because you never know what may be coming the wrong way "illegally", so to speak.

A Pittsburg left is turning left before oncoming traffic starts moving.

Yeah, saw that now. Guilty as charged, I'm not always doing it but there are certain intersections where you can do it in a relatively safe way (especially if you tilt/move as much as you can to the left before the green-light comes on).

happy to see the shout out to the pittsburgh left

I live in brooklyn too and cars are an incredible pain, they take away space, stink, honk and are stuck in traffic on the BQE all the time. Replacing cars with a commuter network of self driving cars would be a great upgrade IMO.

I wouldn't be surprised if self driving cars just never go on most roads and only stay on a handful of well mapped and easy to interpret routes. Like how trucks follow certain routes through cities too.

Nothing about what you have said is unique to NYC/Brooklyn.

Every major dense city that is piloting self-driving cars has been modeling around most of the scenarios you've described

Hmmm ... have you ever driven (or directly observed traffic) in NYC? It's unlike other cities, especially in the US.

This problem might get solved for self-driving vehicles by simply banishing non-autonomous vehicles (including bicycles and pedestrians) from the roads.

Banning all other traffic is of course a solution, but it is hugely unpopular for obvious reasons, so I doubt it will pass.

It will happen slowly, through raising the price of individual vehicles (you can already see the trend with electric vehicles - there are almost no affordable sub $30k cars), raising the price of insuring a human-driven vehicle, etc.

It won't happen overnight, and probably take anywhere between 30-50 years, but it's definitely possible in the long term.

The problem with that theory is that auto manufacturers face declining average costs and so are incentivized to produce more cars and sell them for a lower unit price.

This is why the only source of auto inflation is by adding more features to the car. I don't see any reason why this would change in the future.

For EVs, wait until cheap Chinese EVs flood the US market.

That sounds like it would further increase car dependence in city's, how you see city's improving in this scenario?

oh I'm absolutely not saying this is a good idea. But what I am saying is that it could become politically feasible if tons of money gets poured into self-driving vehicles and they slowly chip away at "open" use of public streets.

Look at what the automobile industry did with "jaywalking" and removal of street cars.

or you can do a san francisco mission left:

- if you're turning left, pull forward until you are into the second half of the intersection but don't actually cross into the opposing traffic

- cars behind you can still navigate around you

- when the light just turns red and the opposing traffic stops, finish the left turn. you're blocking the cross traffic that just turned green anyway so you're safe from that.

The yellow light should be long enough for both one last car in the through direction, and one left turner. At least, that’s common outside of SF. I see your point in SF. Anyone care to comment on this? Could it be a combination of short yellows, relatively wide lanes, and nonexistent enforcement (and therefore diminished fear of all parties crossing a red light)?

In SF usually at the yellow light there are about 5 cars that blast through in the opposite direction at 2X the speed limit. The safest time to actually make the left turn is after it turns red, and you're, um, blocking the intersection.

Protected left turn signals are the correct solution to all of this IMO, and that's the norm in almost all of South Bay.

Thanks! Why are you so confident on protected lefts? Wouldn't we lose significant throughput? Why not just ticket people for running reds?

Most protected lefts have sensors so they don't go through that phase if nobody is waiting for it. The sensors are another issue because they don't trigger for bikes and ebikes, but that can be improved.

I think throughput isn't really a huge issue as long as you have a few main arteries (e.g. expressways, freeways) that don't have left turns at all, you will ideally only take the local roads for a couple km at the beginning and end of a trip at most.

Decade of testing or more likely… never?

Replace "New York" with "Tel Aviv", and nothing else needs to change.

Great summary. This will be an interesting experiment that I think will ultimately fail.

On the basis of what evidence? Seems quite pessimistic given that waymo has been stepping up its activity in sf considerably over the last year.

Just curious more than anything, has there been any model/ai/robot-car that has even come close to responding to the kinds of nuances described above? It seems like so far we are just celebrating that the cars that can stay in a lane, not hit things, which is a huge I get it, but I don't see how sophisticated CV heuristics could even come close to approximating the kinds of edge cases that exist here, both in the social sense of communicating with other drivers, and responding to things that should not be the case (no lines on a road, a double parked car), but in practice are the case everyday in cities.

There are videos of Waymo successfully negotiating a Costco parking lot. Here is a recent video of some scenarios in SF that are close to the nuances described above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA. Notice how there are activity icons indicating pedestrians running, truck stopped with a door open and so on. They can understand a scene pretty well.

Behavior prediction is a large research focus now according to Waymo, so they are thinking about complex situations like these. But a lot of them (like no lane lines, construction, 2 way roads becoming 1 way) can just be encoded in HD maps and distributed to the whole fleet.

Yes, I routinely drive next to these driverless things and they are negotiating plenty of annoying & complicated stuff. I think I must live in a peak location because they are everywhere in my neighborhood in SF, which has lots of fast cars and pedestrians and bikers and skateboarders doing all sorts of crazy things.

Like these actually exist, I guess people on the East coast don't realize it yet?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TFEvkmvIjVo Clearly not perfect in how it handles this as it doesn’t really back up or go onto the sidewalk but these Chinese self-driving cars are handling quite difficult scenarios.

It’s like there’s a phase transition from theoretical ideal driving to ignoring street markings and navigating based on how much space there is around you and intentions of surrounding vehicles. Looks difficult but not impossible.

There are similar videos showing Teslas handling double parked vehicles and oncoming traffic too.

My old neighborhood in sf was crawling with these things negotiating all kinds of traffic conditions. It doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch to me having driven past and alongside on the order of dozens of these things.

I don't envy the people involuntarily enlisted to be "beta testers" by being in proximity of the cars.

There is a future that exists where cars aren’t allowed in major cities. Something similar to Amsterdam where people and bikes have right of way, and cars are the least preferred mode of travel. Obviously there are situations where you need motorized transport (emergencies, moving day, people with disabilities, businesses etc) but these can be serviced by autonomous vehicles run by the city. All vehicle infrastructure (roadways, parking) would be cut dramatically. Autonomous busses that pick up and drop you off exactly where you need would be the preferred mode of transport but you could even have personalized autonomous cars that people can rent for more privacy. But these would be slow moving vehicles swerving in and out of people and bike traffic, all connected to a central hub.

Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will bike or walk and the demand for these vehicles would greatly strain the system. Not sure how you would account for it.

If only New York had a series of underground tubes connecting different parts of the cities. We could put trains in those tubes!

You can blame Robert Moses for that. Everyone that lives in NYC or NJ (or LI) should "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro and you will be blown away.

He despised public transportation (because he never learned to drive, he always had a driver) .He actively designed bridges (over highways) to be purposely low so that the highways could not have bus lanes. When he was building the highways and bridges, he knew that the solution was to combine them with subway lines to reduce traffic congestion but refused to because he was so arrogant and power hungry. His solution was always to widen existing highways or build more highways, and public transportation ridership went from very high in the 1920s to very low in the 1950s/60s.

He did build a lot of stuff, but you could argue that NYC in 2021 is a worse place because of it -- and you really could argue that if you had grandparents (or great-grandparents) that were evicted by his housing policies or construction projects.

While that's all interesting, unless Robert Moses was directing essentially every American city's development it's more than just his preferences that were at work.

I'm not all the way through the book, but I believe this is basically the point. Once Moses' "success" in NY became known, everywhere else in the US started to copy his approach. So he really did have a national influence.

> He actively designed bridges (over highways) to be purposely low so that the highways could not have bus lanes.

That was to keep black New Yorkers from a white beach in, I think, Brooklyn, according to the story I saw.

Yes, that is correct. He purposely designed the highways, parks, and beaches so anyone that could not afford a car could not use them.

It does sound kinda wild when you put it that way. Propose that today and I'd be like "what the HN delusions is this?"

Let's string wires on poles down every street in the nation and use them to put a device in every home that allows anyone in the world to ring a loud bell at any hour, day or night.

pathetic. the real money is if we blanket the planet in radio from high towers and poles, create thousands of types of mostly-incompatible portable wallet-sized devices that provide this ring-a-loud-bell functionality, make them requisite for daily life so everyone must purchase one to the tune of hundreds of dollars per year and keep it on their person, and then create an automated system that randomly rings every device multiple times per day trying to steal money. oh also they spy on everyone constantly and deliver incredibly volatile cognitohazards if you so much as look at them.

and we'll move on from this when we develop cheap brain implants that are even worse

I was thinking about how crazy this is before realising it's true.

Not necessarily. E.g. Hyperloop.

What do you mean not necessarily. Hyperloop sounds like a complete and utter fantasy. Closely followed by tunnels in LA where cars drive themselves actually.

Do you have any idea how much that would cost?!

Yeah stop with this Boring Company crazy talk! /s

If we're unlucky we'll get the worst of both worlds and they'll build tons of tunnels for cars only.

I could live with this. Imagine that every street had a car tunnel under it; it means the space that's taken up by streets today could just be a pleasant park. There would be benches. Kids would be playing catch in them. Instead of loud honking because traffic moving slowly, there would be sunflowers and tall grass everywhere. I'll take it!

It would basically remove cars from cities, without actually removing cars from cities. Seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

They started building this kind of thing around London Walk after the war - rather than more tunnels the cars are at ground level and the walkways above. Best seen at the Barbican and in a newer flavour around JP Morgan’s new office nearby.

And how would people get in and out of the tunnels?

If that insanely stupid shit catches on, it will be the moment I decide to buy a missile silo or a lighthouse and become a full blown hermit.

Can I find one on Zillow? :P

Are you referring to the steam pipes?

What is this? An underground metro for ANTS!?! It needs to be at least twice as large!!

The future you cite is also our past. In the 1930s most large urban cities had plenty of non-car transportation options, including electric-powered or cable-pulled streetcars, overhead-powered electric as well as gas-powered buses, trams, light rail, underground subways (since early 1900s in NYC), and hackneys of all sorts in the US and Europe and many other places around the world. In fact, it was the spread of gas-powered buses that killed much of the electric-powered streetcars in large cities in the US in the 1950s. With the growth of suburbs and loss of streetcars, the growth of cars in city centers grew unchecked as did air pollution and smog.

My mind goes to the healthcare staff who still have to report to their facility for 7:30 in the morning no matter the weather.

There has been a lot of social change since the 1930s. Back then, nurses were seen as subservient and likely lived in residence attached to a hospital. Reporting for duty was not an issue on bad weather days.

No one will live apart from their family in this day and age without appropriate compensation, like the way nurses do working for FHNIB nursing stations up north.

I know you like the film roger rabbit, but that's not why trams died.

It's not the entire reason but it's actually a key part of it [0]. Hey Roger Rabbit isn't entirely fiction but all the good parts are :)

[0] https://www.planetizen.com/node/76622

> It's not the entire reason but it's actually a key part of it [0].

I don't see that in your reference. It's a full-on debunking of the claim that it was a conspiracy.

From the above referenced article:

"For the record, there was a conspiracy according to the 1949 U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in UNITED STATES v. NATIONAL CITY LINES, Inc., et al. "

and more to the point it actually says it up top in the title part of the article: "Yes, there was a conspiracy led by General Motors to replace streetcars with their buses in the 1930s."

I know it was somewhat mingled with the other points in the article, but it was confirmed in a Supreme Court ruling that there was indeed a conspiracy by the National City Lines and others to buy up streetcar lines and close down operations. What the article says is that despite the conspiracy, the industry was already in decline, with the streetcar companies acquired because many were in bankruptcy. And as such, the decline can't be solely and specifically blamed on the conspiracy, which is a matter of trial case law at this point. What the conspiracy did was simply accelerate a process that might have been inevitable. This is why I'm saying (and Roger Rabbit) that it played a part, even if not the central part.

> Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will bike or walk

In the absence of systems for snow removal, most people wouldn't be driving in 2 feet of snow either (yes, some do it, but some people drive in all sorts of reckless circumstances).

The cities in the intersection of "viable to thrive without a car" and "get a lot of snow" mostly do a good job of dealing with the latter to preserve the former. They usually clear snow quickly on the thoroughfares, sidewalks and bike lanes and have other solutions (tunnels, non-road transit, etc) for managing the more difficult journeys.

Northern cities often have snow on the ground and roads during commutes, enough that you need a transportation system that addresses it.

Also, it's cold. Dry or not, people don't want to bike in the cold. And finally, many people are not fit physically for such travel, including the elderly, sick, etc.

I'd say from knowing people who live in boston and chicago the answer is actually mostly not. Especially in boston snowstorms are typically catastrophic and shut down life until they are cleared out which might be quite a long time.

I live in Boston, and would not describe snowstorms as catastrophes that you just wait out. The plows are out right away, and only every few years is there a blizzard bad enough that they'll require people to stay home.

I wonder how much this is going to change now that so many people have figured out that they can work from home at least part of the time. First it starts with snowstorms, then maybe we'll see less traffic on rainy days...

I suspect this is a reflection of availability bias; the only snowstorms you hear about from the people you know in Boston are the ones that are catastrophic and shut down life (which do happen occasionally, but the same could be said of hurricanes in Florida).

Strong disagree - Boston & Cambridge are exceptionally effective at returning life to normal within hours on a snowy day.

Many sidewalks are quickly scooped up by paid workers too.

This NotJustBikes video covers this subject nicely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

Watching his channel has reinforced the dramatically negative impact American transportation policy has had on urban life.

2 feet of snow on the ground is rare, and I honestly believe that people's worries about walking and biking in the snow are more reflective of a lack of familiarity than any genuine unpleasantness.

Nordic countries manage strong bike cultures, too, and don't let winter get in the way of that. I have family in a mountain town in Colorado, and there, the only people using cars to get around town are the tourists, even in winter. This is also how all of America was, not too long ago. My great-grandmother did own a car, but opted instead to ride and walk, year-round, basically until the day she had to move into an old folks' home. Her family's first car was a Model T, and she just never did get in the habit of avoiding the outdoors.

Long story short, it's amazing what human bodies can be comfortable with, if only you give them the chance.

I cycle around London no matter the weather. During the "beast from the East" a few years ago, I found the biggest problem was that any snow sitting on top of our painted white lines seemed to harden. This would mean I'd hit them like they're a kerb and fall off my bike.

Grip issues aside, cycling in the snow isn't too bad provided you have decent gloves.

Yeah, also when raining - I generally just try to avoid painted lines to bike on.

It's even worse here in SF with our metal thingies in the road.

How do you avoid skidding into traffic (or into something else)?

You can get winter tires for bikes. We use studded ones on our cargo bike, and I think that those tires might actually give it more stopping power on ice than regular tires give it on dry pavement.

For my regular old townie, I don't bother. I just pay attention to conditions and slow down when I need to slow down. Ice can be a bit tricky to deal with at low speeds, but one nice trick about bikes is that you can very quickly convert yourself from a bipod to a tripod.

If the weather's really bad and the roads aren't clear, it's a good day to just stay home. IMO cars should be doing the same thing, though. I think that our culture has perhaps become so workaholic that it even overrules common sense.

Had a friend that rode into school on 23rd Street all the way from Williamsburg Brooklyn. Only snow would stop this guy. Cold or rain couldn't. I thought he was nuts because I would have easily taken the train instead.

> Nordic countries manage strong bike cultures, too, and don't let winter get in the way of that.

So how do they ride safely in the snow? Skidding on a bike, especially in traffic, can be catastrophic.

I've noticed more an more "environmental" or "green" type politicans and activists seem to be very anti-progress? Has anyone else noticed this?

For example, automated cars would allow you to park your car outside of the city, but still have car driving to get places. Get's criticized. Would allow for larger capital investments in cars (batteries etc). Just removing parking alone would free up so much space for either more efficient car transport or additional options (yes, bikes).

Auto cars increase sharing opportunities as well. Reducing car ownership.

Smaller / safer nuclear power research would be near totally CO2 emission free - but big fights against that or even exploring it - while talking about how serious climate change is?

Carbon sequestration, storage, capture, ideas to drive global cooling - all shot down.

I've come to think we may end up with a rich group of folks able / willing to invest in stuff creating a sort of second tier society (ie, clean water, air and temp control for them - the rest of us suffering).

This path of emissions reductions can't be the only option worth exploring, even while we pursue it, start thinking of other ideas!

> I've noticed more an more "environmental" or "green" type politicans and activists seem to be very anti-progress?

"Anti-progress" is a very loaded term. What one person views as progression, another may view as regression. Just labeling any opposition as "anti-progress" eliminates the nuance of any actual criticisms. For example:

> Carbon sequestration, storage, capture, ideas to drive global cooling - all shot down.

These aren't shut down because environmentalists just hate the inherent idea of technological countermeasures to global warming. Those ideas are fantastic... if they work. Most environmental activists would rather focus on things that we know will help (reducing energy usage, increasing green energy production), instead of gambling on undeveloped and unproven technology.

How are automated cars and parking outside the city related?

You can park your car outside the city, and use public transport, no self driving technology is required.

It's not that that they are against progress, they are against shiny new things that don't make sense.

Our need is less cars on the road. Not automated cars available per person in anytime of day. at most this will solve parking, but not congestion.

An autonomous car can drop you off at the train stop and then go to the parking lot. That's the same mileage as driving to the parking lot and then walking to the train stop but makes the commute far less soul crushing so more people can/will choose it.

I don't think most people's resistance to using public transport is a two minute walk between the parking lot and the station entrance.

This is where green folks aren't paying attention to what folks want.

Go ahead and ban straws (put in the trash in the restaurant) while letting tons of plastic blow into the ocean from street litter.

Some folks don't want to be on public transit, including liberals and definitely liberal elites (ie, COVID / crime / dirt / safety / whatever).

There is no middle ground on the green / left. We all have to cram into public transit (I took it for a while, the bus would skip my stop if full, NO ONE took action on the clearly crazy idiots disrupting the ride forcing the bus to stop etc). Ideas like robotaxies are fought. Why? I don't get it.

I'm also convinced many liberals / green folks are either very wealthy or don't live in tougher areas. It seems to be -> you take the bus, while I fly my private jet to talk about climate somewhere.

Weirdly, it's going to be the ruthless capitlists, google, uber (ugh!), tesla (run by a bit of maniac) who are moving us forward.

Little support locally. Ie, do a lane on highway dedicated for auto-drive truck trains and cars etc.

"the bus would skip my stop if full"

Minor, but the problem here is that the bus is full, not that it skips your stop. If there's no room on the bus, there's nothing it can do, so it might as well move faster.

We should not be allowing buses to reach capacity, but this calls for more investment in public transit, not less.

Could you back up some of these claims? Skip the stereotypes.

> it's going to be the ruthless capitlists, google, uber (ugh!), tesla (run by a bit of maniac) who are moving us forward.

They haven't done a great job of it yet, but when people spread these claims, the 'ruthless capitalists' sure benefit.

A full bus sounds like a great problem to have. Imagine if every single person in that bus decided to take a 4 seater car to their destination instead.

There's various factions amongst environmentalists, personally I'm very pro nuclear energy , carbon capture and self driving tech (to use outside Cities ideally) . But in some cases low tech solutions are actually better, for example walkable / bike able cities with good transit are amazing for quality of life and the environment.

This is most politicians. They have to say one thing to get the votes from individual citizens but they have to actually do something else to get the money they need from the corporations and special interest groups that they need to actually campaign and travel and do all the other things that they seem to be able to do on a 170k salary. Politicians live like rich people but only get a middle class salary. To make up the difference they vote in a manner that will get their PAC's funded. Most of the time all politicians have to do is not do anything. Status quote means special interests are happy and money keeps flowing. End of the day this works well for the politicians, citizens don't care what they actually do as long as they have the correct letter next to their name, just what they say.

> Has anyone else noticed this?

That has been popular criticism going back at least to the 70s. Sometimes it is even true.

Much more often, "anti-progress" is pretty meaningless code for "attacks things I like".

I mean, make no mistake, there are all sorts of bad ideas in environmental circles, including some outright fascists. But nut-picking weirdos to brand anyone involved in environmental policy circles is just nasty propaganda, no different than calling all capitalists slavers.

> For example, automated cars would allow you to park your car outside of the city, but still have car driving to get places.

People aren't limited by available parking anymore, more cars will just drive idly, increasing the traffic issue which leads to non-bus lane busses being more undesirable and active transport on streets (primarily bikes) being more annoying and thus undesirable. Also increases emissions (particulates from tires and brakes even when using electrical propulsion) and power usage.

> Auto cars increase sharing opportunities as well. Reducing car ownership.

Current Auto cars with a human element (called uber) increases greenhouse gas emissions and displaces public as well as active transport (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c01641), exactly the opposite of what was hoped for. (much less air pollutants tho due to less cold starts, but electrification is probably gonna make that a non-issue)

I don't see how auto cars very much increase car sharing opportunities in cities compared to traditional sharing. For common commuter-type transit auto cars bring very little improvement compared to regular car ownership (since everyone needs a car at the same time). Automated cars have some potential for helping with climate change as a small part of the solution, but very much as infill and not a primary mode of transportation. Probably will make congestion worse though and decrease average people in cars much below 1. (there are also other issues when considering a mostly automated car pool, such as rampant jaywalking due to automated safety stops and the reaction to such a thing)

> Smaller / safer nuclear power research would be near totally CO2 emission free

A more wide spread adoption of a new working design now would take > 20 years and the western world is currently having very tough luck while building new nuclear reactors. It's probably not going to help much with climate change, especially considering that alternate technologies such as wind and solar are in a great position and probably (together with storage solutions) will get better much faster than nuclear. Another hard part is that nuclear power is expensive (due to the needed security, probably no matter what since fission is hard) which stems not from the fuel. Thus it makes little sense to use nuclear as a complement to renewables as peaker plants, as opposed to e.g. gas plants which are ideal and might (hopefully) be converted to use non-fossil fuels in the future (but power-to-gas based stuff).

> Carbon sequestration, storage, capture, ideas to drive global cooling

The first three are (afaict) very much received as a positive, but as a measure of last resort due to cost and energy intensity and not as a replacement to moving away from carbon emissions as possible. They're most likely needed no matter what to archive 1.5°. The last one sounds like a bit science fiction, so probably not a really workable idea (especially due to the potential risks).

The issue is that solutions need to be implemented in a large scale in the next ~10 years which is really not enough time to scale up a newly invented technology, both in the transportation sector (due to long replacement cycles), manufacturing sector (also long replacement times as well as uncertainty) and other infrastructure.

Most governments are still funding research in many things that will probably not make sense for solving climate change (e.g. fusion) and if something unexpectedly works much better and can be implemented much faster than can be expected now we can still use it.

(This is getting a bit long, but...)

To further illustrate the point: Most parts of the solution that get propagated and are getting implemented were already commercialized 10 years ago. Transit, electric cars, wind turbines, heat pumps, PV. Most stuff that wasn't isn't ready to get used on a large scale now.

And for most issues we have working commercial solutions either needing to be utilized on a larger scale (mobility, energy production, heating and some production) or in the pipeline and almost certainly succeeding (energy storage with power-to-gas or other methods, hydrogen for steel and airplanes and similar stuff, concrete). The only issue is doing it, which seems to be the hard part.

> Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will bike or walk and the demand for these vehicles would greatly strain the system. Not sure how you would account for it.

Cities like Copenhagen perfectly demonstrate that people are still willing to bike even under harsh weathers. The main think you'd have to ensure in order to keep the use high during winter is to keep the cycling lanes safe by removing the snow within a reasonable time.

> Cities like Copenhagen perfectly demonstrate that people are still willing to bike even under harsh weathers. The main think you'd have to ensure in order to keep the use high during winter is to keep the cycling lanes safe by removing the snow within a reasonable time.

Is that the only solution to biking after a snowfall? I've wondered what they do.

In NYC they can't even remove the garbage, let alone the snow.

An alternative to not allowing cars at all is simply eliminating on street parking.

At least in NYC.

Get rid of on street parking and traffic will plummet. More importantly, a LOT of space will open up.

This is probably true of most American downtowns.

> Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will bike or walk

The Scandinavian big cities beg to differ.

The difference is European cities were established long before cars were a thing, so it's going to be a lot easier for them to go back to that model. American cities were all built around cars being the fundamental mode of transportation.

> European cities were established long before cars were a thing

The small, touristy, beautiful medieval cores of many famous European cities are like this.

The vast oceans of newer construction surrounding this core were made in just as much of a car-centric way as in the U.S.

Here is the touristy area of Prague:

https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0841727,14.4275766,3a,75y,13...

Here is what a normal street in Prague looks like, outside the tourist area: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0563622,14.5390901,3a,75y,56...

Here is a touristy part of Rome:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9058174,12.4832519,3a,75y,32...

Normal street in Rome:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.915433,12.5445313,3a,75y,189...

This is such a poor excuse. What you mentioned may apply to the comparatively small historic city centers of European city centers, but most certainly not to the decades of new construction during the car time. In fact, many city centers have been specifically re-worked to better accommodate cars as the primary mean of transport.

Just look at pictures of Amsterdam in the 1970s [1], long before it became such a bike centric city. It is perfectly possible to do that in other European cities as well as American, especially given the increasing support for such measures.

[1] https://twitter.com/radentscheid_s/status/104577226157429964...

Thats just not true of NYC, Boston, DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and basically every other east coast city

In better managed cities, keeping sidewalks and bike lanes free of snow to the point it doesn't bother anyone is not difficult. It doesn't work in NYC, for example, because of, you guessed it, cars...specifically parked cars.

Cars can't drive in 2 feet of snow either. And if you say what about plows? Plows apply to bike lanes and roads - which ideally would be bike / bus / vans only.

This may be unrealistic in our life time. I have 2 kids, 1 toddler and 1 newborn, i can't imagine biking, using public transportation or anything similar when going to doctor, grocery shopping, etc.

That's because so much of the US is built around suburban sprawl and is incredibly hostile to anyone not in a car.

I'd recommend the youtube channel "Not Just Bikes", a guy who moved from Canada to the Netherlands. It's perfectly normal over there to do everything you said is unrealistic.

Imagine not having to chaperone your kids around until they're old enough to drive. In much of the US, this is unthinkable, and it takes a large mental toll on parents, but in the Netherlands, it's not uncommon for elementary schoolers to bike to and from school, friends houses, even riding public transit on their own.

In much of the US, your kids can be taken by social services for this, even if it was perfectly safe for them to do so. And even if it's legal to let your kids be fairly independent, it doesn't matter when you have to fight to get them back (very much "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride").

It's depressing just how far we've fallen under the guise of "protect the children".

I feel you. Father of 3 here. My two year old always just runs as far as fast as he can pretty much whenever he gets a chance. Won't stay in the stroller either. Putting him in a carseat is much easier. Just went on a flight the other day with the kids and chasing him around the airport wasn't easy, although in the end it was somewhat manageable.

Car travel with kids is way easier compared to other methods.

We took the kids to Paris a while back and carting the stroller up and down the stairs to the metro was a huge pain.

I have two kids and can't imagine forcing them into a car seat at least twice a day. Our walks around our neighborhood are some of our best time together. On the way to school they get exercise, run into friends, and build their autonomy by leading. We walk to the doctor. We walk to the grocery store. Find yourself a built environment that frees you from the shackles of a car.

It's definitely possible; if you talk to parents who live in cities they'll generally be happy to describe how they do it.

(Raised two kids from 0 to 5y and 7y without a car. Started splitting a car about 6 months ago when we had a third child. Lots of walking, double decker stroller, bus, subway, and bike trailer.)

If you can banish cars from cities to the extent you have described, there's not much incentive at that point to try and automate away the drivers. They wouldn't be randos any more, they'd be professionals, and it's going to be a while before automation catches up to the best drivers on the road.

Toronto solved this for the core with an underground mall

snow day :)

I dislike public transport purely because I don’t want to travel with all those people around me.

I don’t really see how making the vehicles autonomous helps? We could have that future now with normal vehicles if we just disallow them. We don’t need the technocracy to do it.

Having ridden in a Waymo in Phoenix a month ago, I don’t think they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan traffic. As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed turns several times forcing a reroute around the block because it couldn’t change lanes because the driver in the next lane didn’t let it in. A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to get ahead of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch over the line to force themselves in. The Waymo car just maintained its speed and lane position until it was too late to turn. I can’t imagine how the car would fare in NYC with its famously aggressive drivers.

Seems like a great reason to test, gather data, and improve in NYC, no?

Sounds like a great reason to train the model on a closed road with a trained (and consenting) driver playing the role of "lane-blocking-driver" (in that example).

This isn't Tesla we're talking about, Waymo has a large testing facility where they do exactly that sort of thing. Here's an indepth report on it from 4 years ago https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...

But that would take about a billion years, with all the variations and edge cases.

Sounds more like a great reason to stay away from some of the most chaotic traffic in the US until it can be considered safer. There are far, far more pedestrians in NYC than in Phoenix, and I do not trust a Waymo car to not hit some of them.

When I got my NYC drivers license, the full end to end test was 8 minutes (I got a printout) on empty roads.

I’d take a high quality autonomous vehicle over a tired Uber driver any day as a pedestrian

In the article (only a few paragraphs btw) it specifically says the goal is to map and have safety operators manually controlling all the vehicles.

I trust a Waymo car way-more than Tesla's autopilot...

Generally, self driving cars are very safe, too safe actually. There are some high profile accidents, most of them involving Tesla because of the scale and way they approach the problem, plus an infamous one by Uber, but generally, self driving cars will not go anywhere unless they are sure the way is clear.

And this is the problem, self driving cars don't force their way, and they break when anything is vaguely in a collision course. If there is a problem putting them in NYC traffic is that they will stop all the time and create traffic jams, maybe get rear ended by other (human) drivers and fail to get their passengers to the destination because of some minor obstruction.

There are people behind the wheel.

And as evidence for that, you use ... an example of Waymo being overly cautious?

I routinely drive and walk near these vehicles, they do not seem in danger of hitting anyone.

I can't wait to see one and punch the hood and yell "I'm walkin' here!"

I don't know about New York but I live in a major city and I wonder what will happen when the homeless population figures out they can mess with them.

But to what end?

Gathering more data on a problem you don't know how to solve won't give you a solution to solving it. We don't have any evidence to support that current AI is capable of the advanced problem solving the city driving requires.

Every city on earth thinks their traffic is the most chaotic. Having driven around Manhattan a lot, I'd say it is probably the easiest use case for automation. Wide streets, perfect grid, slow traffic, flat, standard weather conditions, no two-way traffic lanes to cross. In fact I fail to see how this data would even be valuable to Waymo compared to what they are already getting from Phoenix and San Francisco.

You are either a troll, or have never driven a car in Manhattan. It is without a doubt the craziest, rudest, most agrrssive city I have ever driven in, and is 100% the hardest city to automate driving in. If Waymo can succeed in NYC, they can succeed anywhere in the first world. India and Thailand are a whole different ball game, but we will see.

I found driving in Manhattan to be fairly civilized, honestly. Boston, on the other hand, is by far the worst city I've driven in on the surface street level. Atlanta the worst for highway driving.

Yea I don't know how one can look at NYC traffic and claim it's anything other than a total shitshow.

Yes yes, never mind the pedestrians for whom crosswalks and walk indicators are mere suggestions, or the thousands of delivery guys going 30mph on e-bikes in every possible (different from legal!) direction of travel.

And while there are lots of wide, slow, neatly gridded streets, there are tons of streets that are none of those things.

NYC is certainly not the most chaotic, but it’s a billion times more so than Phoenix.

This is just east coast cities..

Something that astonished me when I moved to SF was how little people jaywalk here.

Where are these wonderful wide streets, beyond the avenues and major cross-town streets? Most are a lane or less, especially with double-parking.

> perfect grid

Only above 14th Street, and even then, that ignores e.g. Broadway which has a bunch of really frustrating-to-drive intersections with a ton of pedestrian traffic

> standard weather conditions

A year in Manhattan has significantly more variability in weather conditions than a year in Phoenix or San Francisco

> no two-way traffic lanes to cross

There are undoubtedly significantly more one-ways in Manhattan than many other cities but two-way streets absolutely still exist, most of the wider streets in the grid system are two-way, so's Houston

I think it's safe to say that Manhattan traffic is more complex than suburban Phoenix, without claiming Manhattan traffic is the most chaotic.

It isn't a perfect grid and the streets aren't all wide. There is no shortage of two way streets where left turns are impossible without skirting the law.

Agree, it's perplexing that Waymo thinks it makes more sense to start mapping out NYC rather than making the product work in Phoenix or SF.

You could interpret this as confidence, i.e. they're so close to a working service in Phoenix/SF that they want to lay the groundwork for NYC right away.

Or you could interpret is as a lack of confidence, i.e. they don't have much progress to report, and they're positioning that as "the reason we don't have a working product yet is that we're trying to solve the whole problem at once, and that's really hard."

> As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed turns several times forcing a reroute around the block because it couldn’t change lanes because the driver in the next lane didn’t let it in.

This is basically how I navigate NYC on my bike. Sometimes I can easily make a left turn, and do. Sometimes I evaluate that that's not possible, and make three rights at the next block instead. It works out in the end.

A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to get ahead of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch over the line to force themselves in

Is this exactly the kind of behavior that would make self-driving cars safer?

It will be safer but it will also be stopped in one place for a long time, possibly forever. A driver attempting to proceed through an intersection in Manhattan needs to present a credible appearance of being willing to kill someone, otherwise the pedestrians and other cars will just block it in a continuous parade, regardless of the state of the signals. I don't really see how you can program a car to deal with that.

> I don’t think they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan traffic.

That's why they are starting to map new york and record human driving.

> Our vehicles will be manually operated by autonomous specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance our technology in support of our mission to make roads safer.

They are not starting any sort of taxi service, nor are they letting the computer drive, according to the article.

As a Massachusetts driver I think it would be great to get as many of these on the road because it would be free flowing traffic for me without having to deal with people being pissed off.

All the things I don't do because a human is driving I could start doing.

Drive all the way to the end of a line of cars taking an exit ramp and just cut it. The waymo car will always yield. Same goes for zipper traffic, just go for it, waymo will back off. Could probably also steal a parking spot from a waymo vehicle...

Imagine if Waymo had started business in Manhattan and then deployed the trained vehicles in Phoenix.

The current title on HN is misleading. They are not beginning to test their self-driving system; rather, they are beginning to collect map data, which is a step that needs to be done first.

Really awesome stuff to see them start mapping NYC more heavily.

Doesn't look like most people even bothered reading the article. They admit it has very little to do with trying to actually give rides or autonomously drive in the NYC area, but rather to map and get data on how the cars perform in different weather conditions.

Hopefully this announcement also means they are finding the testing in SF very useful and are accelerating their expansion

These days, it looks like everyone on HN comes with a preconceived notion about the company, topic, product, technology a given submission is and write their views as if they are expert on everything before reading the post and giving it a thought. e.g. in this post, Waymo, a company who has spent billions of dollars and years of work and research and being where they are right now, is posting about their plans. It's obvious they must have thought about the traffic, the jaywalkers, the complex intersections, the weather before making this decision. But let's ignore that and post how this is a bad idea. Being a skeptic is fine. It just feels like the skepticism is dialed to 11 here.

There is nothing technical about the replies, nothing hacker about them. Just, "I am very smart" comments.

> There is nothing technical about the replies, nothing hacker about them.

Exactly. The top comment in this thread is just listing some complex scenarios they've encountered and then assuming Waymo haven't thought about it. In reality, there is already evidence of Waymo navigating complex situations and plenty of published research in those areas.

Hey I made that comment! I assume Waymo has thought about it. I assume lots of people at Waymo have spent plenty of time in NYC. I also don't say that this was impossible or I think it will fail.

What I do believe is that there are tons of edge cases, and diminishing returns with trying to solve for all of them. And, I would guess that it will take quite a while (the decade I mentioned) before self driving technology is capable of making >95% of trips autonomously without extra issues that most human drivers would handle.

Additionally, I think there are moral and comfort issues with AI that need to be addressed. This is speculation, but Waymo likely aims for the appearance of safety and tunes things to be overly cautious. That is at odds with some of the dynamics of driving in NYC, where you need to be assertive and maybe even risky, and I'm curious to see how that will play out.

I can see how it sounds like I'm just shitting on this tech. My intention was more to describe that self-driving in NYC is maybe even a harder problem than it sounds, and possibly an overreaction to the hype about this technology. I think about it pretty often when I'm driving or biking and encounter situations that seem very difficult for a computer to navigate.

I have observed the same and I'm making a more conscious effort to help downvote comments that aren't really adding anything to the conversation or are just purely snark (e.g. "it's almost as if...").

Your comment unfortunately captures possibly the best summary of the current dominant HN culture I have seen.

And yet, I get the feeling just by being straight about it, you also come close to breaking some HN guidelines about not insinuating bad intentions, etc… I do think you have done it in a way that is pretty reasonable though, so hopefully it's not a problem.

Sure wish it was not this way. One, I wish it wasn't all about "I am very smart" and two, I also wish we could talk about this stuff without risking being reprimanded.

> you also come close to breaking some HN guidelines about not insinuating bad intentions

To be clear, I don't think the posters have bad intentions or in other words making such comments intentionally. It's just how any community evolves over the time if conscious efforts to curtail discussions heading in such directions are not made.

The worst part is that most people aren’t reading the articles. But it’s off limits to call people out for it.

> It just feels like the skepticism is dialed to 11 here.

Dialed to 11? Ours goes to 101!

The posts says, “ Our vehicles will be manually operated by autonomous specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance our technology in support of our mission to make roads safer.”

So this really is just mapping/training, not testing?

It's nice to know that the specialists who'll be operating these vehicles are autonomous.

If they weren't autonomous, they'd be employees.

Wouldn't want any Borg driving those things around.

About that... https://research.google/pubs/pub43438/

Maybe hybrid depending on conditions, driver control only required in case of risky situations

No. According to the press release the vehicles in NYC will all be manually controlled at all times.

Correct, I think the title submitted is just misleading

NYC is going to be an interesting case. As soon as pedestrians get comfortable that the cars won't hit them, I suspect a lot of jaywalking will happen - I wonder if they'll get anywhere at all. You sort of have to br an aggressive driver too with taxis and delivery trucks, so I'm really curious to see how it all works out.

Yep, I think this is how it’s going to work out, too. The dawdling driverless vehicles (paralyzed by opportunistic jaywalkers) will actually make the traffic worse.

The worst possible future is if entrenched interests (waymo, etc) begin lobbying for more active measures of jaywalking enforcement (first policing, but also fences to keep those pesky humans on the sidewalk), as a way to get around the technical problem of becoming a more aggressive/communicative driver.

The only natural conclusion of that possible future would be streets that are utterly hostile to humans, which would be throwing away one of NYC’s best assets.

I hope it doesn’t come to fruition! And I hope driverless car tech can solve this problem.

The idea is developed more / better articulated here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/12/automated-vehi...

I really don't know why driverless car companies aren't going all in on busses. You can sell your tech to bus manufacturers, and if you lobby for BRT you have your own grade separated right of way which makes a lot of these monumental engineering challenges with self driving cars poof into thin air instantly. The biggest cost for a bus for a transit agency is the benefits package and salary for the driver.

Because cars are more general purpose and thus significantly bigger market. Google is a $2 trillion market cap business. Building a $100 bill business, for example, isn't going to move the needle. It sounds crazy, but they sort of have to go after things this large.

You sort of have to be an aggressive driver too with taxis and delivery trucks, so I'm really curious to see how it all works out.

There's a theory paper on this: "Go ahead, make my day: Robot conflict resolution by aggressive competition"[1] This is a known problem with mobile hospital robot carts. Many hospitals have robot carts moving linens and meals around a big plant. If they make no attempt to get others out of their way, they keep getting stalled by people talking in halls and crowding into elevators. So some degree of pushyness has to be programmed in.

Cars, though. That may not work out as well. Maybe lighting and sound effects to encourage people to get out of the way.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.43.4...

Great link. Thanks.

Jaywalking is already constant and ubiquitous in NYC. Most people simply do not observe crosswalk lights and wait to cross a street (not talking about avenues). And distracted pedestrians on their phones have brought the danger to a whole new level over the last decade. As you suggest, some bad actors will take it even further and provocatively test the safety response of automated cars. Pedestrian deaths are on the rise in NYC, and I believe beta testing self-driving cars will only contribute to that trend.

Jaywalking aside, I'm interested in seeing how these vehicles handle the green arrows + pedestrian GO signals that occur at the same time.

Wait, are they actually test driving self-driving cars like the HN title says? The article seems to indicate they are manually driving the cars to get the mapping.

Either way, it will be super interesting to see how self-driving cars fare in Manhattan. I would expect that there would need to be tweaks to the aggressiveness of the AI to drive there compared to somewhere like Phoenix.

> Wait, are they actually test driving self-driving cars like the HN title says? The article seems to indicate they are manually driving the cars to get the mapping.

My read is that they're doing both, but the latter will be starting immediately while the former is implied to come after they've amassed a certain amount of both mapping and training data.

It would not be interesting. There should not be cars in Manhattan whether they have 0, 1, or more drivers.

I’m as pro-transit as anyone but I don’t foresee a future where we have no cars in Manhattan any time soon. Taxis do serve a purpose even with the best subway system in the world, like when you need to go somewhere with more items than you can carry (as a parent of two young children this happens to me a lot more than it did in my twenties!)

A Manhattan without private cars would still be a huge leap forward and feels more achievable (though neither feel achievable any time soon in absolute terms)

> Taxis do serve a purpose even with the best subway system in the world

And from what I have read, while Manhattan is the best Subway system in the United States, it is far from being the best in the world (see for example, Tokyo).

> A Manhattan without private cars would still be a huge leap forward and feels more achievable

Yes

> (though neither feel achievable any time soon in absolute terms)

Why? Only political reasons I think. I don't see any technology or capacity issue with no private cars.

> (as a parent of two young children this happens to me a lot more than it did in my twenties!)

Ride-share needs to include some cargo wagons. I am against childless-yuppie-focused transit initiatives too. We need to follow Europe's lead in making transit policy compatible with more demographics, or we will never overcome the current impasse.

I’m all in favor of making our cities more pedestrian- and transit-centered, but isn’t this a little of an unproductively absolutist stance? Is there much of a difference between a shareable self-driving car and a tram?

I think politics in the US is extremely risk-averse and afraid to depart from status-quo. I see no solution but to be more absolutist to drive the politics forward.

"Left-YIMBY shock therapy"

I've heard this before but I'm not sure how it'd work. Would it just be trucks doing deliveries? Wouldn't they still need parking and roads? What's gained by banning the cars if you can't reclaim the roads?

> Would it just be trucks doing deliveries?

Yes

> Wouldn't they still need parking and roads?

This would still be something like today's yellow zones.

> What's gained by banning the cars if you can't reclaim the roads?

There would be far fewer lanes for the remaining trucks on avenues, and non-avenues could pedestrianized with trucks only allowed to enter if they need to access something on that block.

If they can make self-driving cars practical, it seems likely the technology would be transferable to buses.

And that could reduce costs of and/or increase access to public transit. (Which could be done once the technology is proven, regardless of whether Waymo is interested in participating.)

So even to someone who wants to purge Manhattan of cars, it still seems like it would be interesting.

> If they can make self-driving cars practical, it seems likely the technology would be transferable to buses.

Manhattan barely needs buses. Rail is much better. Capital investment would be directed to more rail than self driving buses for the remainder.

> And that could reduce costs of and/or increase access to public transit.

Other place should still focus on rail over buses. Or bikes if they are really small. Buses are stop-gap on their way out unless we choose to stagnate instead (quite likely, I'm afraid).

> So even to someone who wants to purge Manhattan of cars, it still seems like it would be interesting.

My compromise is do in transit deserts in Queens and Brooklyn, but there is absolutely no reason to do it in Manhattan.

Having seen these putting around the Inner Richmond at night and now visiting NYC and witnessing the chaos that is driving here, i'm not sure they're quite ready to handle this level of a problem.

NYC would require a true level 5 autonomous vehicle and i'm not sure it's even possible to drive 100% legally at all times given variables like construction, pedestrians going the wrong way on one-ways on scooters, et al.

I hope they can figure it out and wish them good luck!

you know that thing where drivers see a bicyclist and just shut down because they are afraid they are going to dart out in front of them (not arguing with the instinct, bicyclists are pretty bad)

I ride near the waymo depot on the way to work. they always don't know what to do about me and pretty much just stop in confusion until I'm well clear. forget about construction. I just cant imagine what they would do in an actual urban environment.

this whole thing just feels like a deeply misplaced marketing excersise right now.

What problem is this solving? NYC doesn't have a problem with people either not being able to drive or not knowing where they're going. We have workable (for an American definition of workable) mass transit and several livery services including taxis and Uber.

We're trying to get rid of cars here. Congestion pricing, the widening of pedestrian and biking thoroughfares, just to name two initiatives. We don't need more cars, regardless whether or not they're being human-driven or not.

Faster, cheaper, safer, more reliable transport has always been a strong value proposition and likely always will be.

There are technical risks here, but there are not product/value proposition problems.

NYC has something around 200,000 for-hire drivers among taxis, Ubers, etc. The need for all that human effort can be removed.

Yes, eliminating cars entirely would be great, but that's an orthogonal problem.

I agree. Public transportation in the US is great if we use 1950s standards. It’s falling behind because politicians don’t have a long enough cycle to see the fruits of their labor.

NYC needs to up it's biking game. It's getting there but still a long ways away. Plus riding a citi bike is like a life-or-death experience half the time.

Maybe you could eliminate most parking spaces and reduce the total number of cars if everyone would share a number of real-self-driving cars.

I'm somewhat amused to see all the people who dismissed Waymo because they only operated in "easy" environments like Phoenix and later SF now being equally dismissive of Waymo tackling NYC. Of course it's going to be a challenge, but they seem confident enough to give it a crack, and I wish them luck. If they can handle NYC, they'll be able to operate pretty much anywhere in the US.

Very excited to hop into one of these, hope they expand to Brooklyn soon.

I feel like alarmbells must be going of @ Uber HQ with how fast Waymo is scaling

Well.. Uber sold their self-driving division to Aurora (Sequoia Capital and Amazon). They've kinda committed themselves to being solely a gig-economy app with no plans or ambition.

Not exactly; they want the benefits that they think self-driving will bring, without doing the work.

> Aurora is not paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment last year from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (As a refresher, Uber held an 86.2% stake (on a fully diluted basis) in Uber ATG, according to filings with the SEC. Uber ATG’s investors held a combined stake of 13.8% in the company.) Shareholders in Uber ATG will now become minority shareholders of Aurora. Notably, once the deal closes, Uber together with existing ATG investors and the ATG employees who continue their employment with Aurora are expected to collectively hold about 40% interest in Aurora on a fully diluted basis.

> Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will take a board seat in the newly expanded Aurora.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/07/uber-sells-self-driving-un...

Uber is basically shifting from a heavy NIH "build, don't buy" culture to a less insulated culture. This is manifesting at all levels, from more widespread adoption of AWS/GCP internally to seeking partnership deals (in SDV w/ Aurora, but also in other areas e.g. SKTelecom, etc)

spending piles of money developing self-driving and managing a large fleet of automated cars is kind of antithetical to the way uber operates anyway

It was explicitly their goal back in the day. Paid drivers were seen as a stepping stone.

I always got a filing Uber was not serious about it and used it more for evaluation pump.

Tesla is the one that should be hearing alarmbells, their evaluation is partially coming from their promises of (real) FSD, that they have been overpromising and underdelivering so far.

They are literally the only company that has autopilot in production at scale.

Waymo is doing autonomous driving though, autopilot is driver assist, they're not even remotely the same product.

Is this a joke? Their scaling has been at a snails pace.

That's how the start of an exponential growth trend works.

Self driving is an interesting paradox. Many of the problems we have with self-driving cars would be mitigated by having a large majority of self-driving cars on the road sharing data and coordinating with each other as a network. Need to merge left in 2 miles? Ask the cars in the other lane to slow or accelerate slightly to provide the opening. Unfortunately we can't simply flip a switch and enter this reality, and we're stuck trying to solve the much harder problem of designing self-driving cars that can ably share the road with other human drivers.

I grew up in New York City. I wish them good lucky messengers delivering packages from uptown to downtown delivery guys on electric bikes are all over the place you can fugaatabout getting through times square ANYTIME of the day its straight up bumper to bumper. Yellow cabs don't even care about bike lanes. Buses in the bus lane ( don't make me laugh) there should be NO CARS allowed in the city ( natives call manhattan "the city" the trains are packed. The streets are JAM packed with people. there are simply too many damn people and not to mention uber / lyft / food delivery guys messengers on foot and on bikes and some take the train. I mean enough is enough. we need less cars and more walking in the city. I don't even want to get into all the trucks in the fashion district you need to see it to believe it. Did i forget to mention yellow cabs? ok good lucky waymo. 2cents.

I hate the self driving car approach. They are fitting cars into crappy legacy roads. They could change the infrastructure, roads and transportation so we won’t have to avoid problems and eliminate the situations from occurring but we’d rather fit crappy models in crappy old infrastructure instead of making roads that are more conducive to technology. It’s like making an android for handling a horse carriage.

Yeah, nope. 'smart' roads mean wasting billions on sensors that would become outdated soon after being installed and banning non-'smart' users is political suicide impossible even in China. Also, do animals, pedestrians and cyclists need to wear a transponder to avoid getting squashed like a bug?

https://ideas.4brad.com/forget-smart-cities-you-need-make-yo...

I live in a city that uses pressure sensors to detect if a car passed red lights. It’s still not outdated over 10 years later. You don’t need smart roads you just need to make roads visible for self driving cars. They shouldn’t need to be fit into acting like humans. Your dystopian vision is a very narrow and biased assumption, it doesn’t need electronics, it’s simple as using covered bridges, machine readable signs and powered rails like streetcars. China did exactly what I mentioned by using high speed rails rather than focusing on fitting self driving cars and bypasses the pedestrian and transponders you focused on avoiding.

> They are fitting cars into crappy legacy roads.

> They could change the infrastructure

Those are two different “they.”

I'm surprised waymo is collecting data in manhattan where there's great public transit coverage. The outer boroughs would be much more useful.

I wonder if people will just get used to the way driverless cars drive and make some allowances for them. Waymo at least are easy to spot.

As a driver really your main job is to be predictable. If you’re doing something legal or dumb or borderline. The main thing you need is for everyone to understand what that thing is.

So as long as waymo cars are predictable we’ll be able to get used to them.

I see a lot of comments that conclude that the only way to drive in NYC is to drive like a local. AVs will be an interesting experiment in attempting to break the paradigm. AVs have infinite patience. I'm sure that will drive some locals accustomed to aggressive driving right out of their minds. AVs will drive differently. That may be good thing.

Question for SF folks: I see self driving cars all the time in the inner Richmond. This is happy-path driving, all 4-way stops, not much traffic, not many pedestrians. Easy driving. Are the firms doing as much mileage in rush hour in tougher driving spots, e.g from Bush to 2nd to the Bay Bridge at 5pm?

Hope they're trained to react to "I'm walkin' here!"

They seem to be going for a strategy where they train the AIs separately for each location.

In 50 years we may still be complaining about how all Boston drivers are a-holes, but the drivers will be AIs instead of humans.

NYC presents a lot of driving challenges not present in Phoenix. This must mean they are feeling more confident about how well their technology handles winter driving conditions and lots of pedestrians.

Mobileye released a demo some time ago that shows their system driving in NYC: https://youtu.be/50NPqEla0CQ

Very cool, maybe in 10 more years they'll expand to Chicago too.

this would be a huge leap, i wonder at which point the government will require these firms to open their data to each other for safety purposes. if you think about it, when it comes to self driving cars, data is safety. the quality and quantity are of that data can literally mean life or death when it comes to self-driving cars. it'll be interesting to see what the future looks like

I wonder how well they'll do in the snow/sleet/mush conditions. So far they've been testing in perfect weather conditions.

Question: will their self-driving cars be safe even if the deep-learning part of their code always makes the wrong prediction?

Key sentence:

> We’ll be manually driving with five hybrid Chrysler Pacificas on the street during daylight.

So no self driving for now, not even supervised.

Will be interested to see how this works out. Don't understand why people are treating this as a bad thing here.

Do Waymo hire people working permanently remote or is it all in-office?

at what point would it be easier just to lobby to standardize roads and profit share with said cities to keep the "standard roads" in place?

As I understood it they are only gathering data, it might be a PR stunt. I think we're still not able to handle such chaotic environments.

Waymo seems to do lot of these sort of publicity stunts. As far as I know their service and lidar mapping is very limited to some suburbs of Phoenix

They give full autonomous rides in Chandler, but are giving safety driver-in-the-car rides in SF and Phoenix.

Doesn't seem like much of a publicity stunt

I don't think safety driver in the car rides have any value. They're just getting paid to add sensor data to their ml platform.

If a self-driving car kills someone, who is put on trial for negligence?

The same as if a human hits someone with a car -- nobody.

no need to tip the driver, yay!

so did they fix google docs?

serves you liberals right.

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